Robocop: A Review

What a shame: Robocop isn't like Blade Runner. It's not even like Blade Runner crossed with Brazil, or, hell, Brazil crossed with Aliens. Alas, Robocop is what it is: a great movie-that-could-have-been encased inside one hour and forty-two minutes of mediocrity.

The movie is set in a futuristic Detroit that has turned management of its police force over to the Omni Consumer Products Corporation. Omni dabbles in "areas traditionally considered nonprofit," including space travel, and, thanks to favorable tax laws, is doing quite well. In addition to running Detroit's police force, Omni has plans to reorg the entire city, turning the crime-ridden metropolis into immaculate and trouble-free "Delta City."

But Delta City is still a few months in the future. In the meantime, Omni is reassigning the work precincts of numerous Detroit police offers. One of those officers is Alex J. Murphy (Peter Weller), whom Omni moves from the relatively low-crime Metro South precinct to the high-crime Metro West precinct. Murphy is partnered with the tough-but-tender Officer Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen). Murphy and Lewis are just finishing cups of coffee on the first break of their first day of working together when they receive a call to apprehend a band of suspected bank robbers. Murphy and Lewis pursue the gang into a warehouse in an industrial part of town, where Murphy is shot multiple times and left for dead.

Being dead, or just about dead, doesn't end his career as a cop, even if Murphy might want it to. In fact, it makes him Omni's first choice for a remarkable promotion. Omni wants a cop that can keep law on the streets 24/7, year-round, and to that end they're developing a cyborg cop. In scenes that begin with an array of hospital stretchers and blurry overhead lights, Murphy becomes Omni property and the new Robocop. His memory is erased, his personality recoded, and his body is transformed by technology and encased in shatterproof, gleaming white material. Murphy is put back on the force, and he starts cleaning up the streets. Unfortunately, the memory erasure hasn't been entirely successful: Murphy still recalls bits and pieces about the men who nearly killed him, and he's soon seeking revenge.

Robocop's plot is filtered through the lens of its characters, which I think is the primary reason the movie is so dispiriting. The bad guys are Very Bad, Very Mad. They're so buffoonish that I never believed they could get themselves out of bed in the morning, let alone create the concentrated synthesis of time, planning, and opportunity that it takes to rob a bank. They're over the top without any qualities that usually make me like characters who are over the top (Health Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight was a similar character, but he had that great wicked make-up and, underneath that, hints of a philosophy of chaos). Making matters even worse, Robocop's bad guys are the cinematic equivalent of a high-pitched whine: listening to Kurtwood Smith's Clarence J. Boddicker, along with the rest of Boddicker's gang, screech, hoot, and cackle their way through the movie made me wish I was deaf.

Robocop's good guys aren't a lot better. They're Decent Human Beings, Angry Victims. They care about their families and about fair wages and that's about it. At their essence, they're merely the moral opposites of the bad guys, without any of the complexities that would give them the depth of whole human beings. Weller and Allen are hamstrung by their characters: they have a palpable energy that seems to be curtailed at every point - to the viewer's frustration.

Thankfully, Robocop's visuals aren't as flat as its psychology. The movie utilizes a gray-brown-blue color scheme, and some of its best sequences feature imposing, futuristic architecture. At Omni Corporation, for instance, we see a glass elevator rising upward through architectural grid-work, gliding past floor after floor; it seems headed straight for the sky. The elevator is as sleek as a test tube, as quiet as a time capsule floating through space. Omni's architecture, and the way it's filmed, generates a hypnotic feeling of power, and as we sit with its executives in a large boardroom, looking out over the vast expanse of a Detroit that soon will easily be transformed into Delta City, things seem clean and inevitable.

The plot, then, is kinetic with potential: corporations running cities and police divisions; futuristic depictions of crime, both white and blue-collar; cyborgs whose human memories are their Achilles heels. The visuals aren't perfect, but combined with the plot - and Basil Poledouris' bombastic music - they could become something riveting.

But what, in fact, happens with all of this potential? It gets taken down, notch by notch. You sit there, conscious that the clock is racing toward the finale and that windows of opportunity for the filmmakers to do something imaginative or creative are disappearing. Maybe they'll do something good here? No? Okay, but maybe here? No, but... maybe, please maybe, here? That, friends, is the Robocop experience. It may have been rectified in Verhoeven's director's cut, released by Criterion several years ago, which I have not seen. As it is, the original theatrical version is something of a cyborg in its own right - the spark of life is here, but without much soul.