The first of Dutch Director Paul Verhoeven’s three English
language cult sci-fi films, Robocop
is a movie that owes a great debt to the comic book character Judge Dredd and was inspired by Blade Runner. In
the near future Detroit
is a city on the verge of collapse. There are no jobs and criminal gangs run
the streets. The mega-corporation OCP runs the battered up police force and
hopes to create a new super-city in the ruins of Detroit. To clean up the streets they design
an automated robot cop but when tests go badly they return to the drawing
board. Veteran cop Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is out on patrol with his new
partner Officer Ann Lewis (Nancy Allen) when he encounters a criminal gang. The
cops chase the gang to an abandoned mill where Murphy is brutally killed. OCP
use what is left of Murphy’s body to create a new version of their robotic
policeman – Robocop.
I saw Robocop when
I was in my early teens at remember thinking it was pretty violent and cool.
Now aged twenty-six and twenty-five years after the movie’s initial release, I
found the film had aged very badly and wasn’t anywhere near as fun as I
remembered. The violence though, remains.
