Ha ha, please don’t leave, it’s just me, Burl, here to
review an action picture from the 1980s! It’s called Robocop, and of course we’ve all seen the picture and have a
healthy appreciation of it, no doubt! I recall
seeing this one in the movie theatre, though I had to sneak in! Ha ha, I once tried to sneak into the
same theatre to see Cobra, but didn’t
make it that time! I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that was bad luck
operating for me then, or good!
I was certainly pleased to get in to Robocop! As we’re all aware, it takes place in some near but
unspecified future year (my guess: 1997, just like Predator 2!), and in Detroit, and in this particular time and
place, crime is rampant! Police services have been privatized, and robot forces
are called in to deal with the malfeasants! There are two schools of thought on
this point, however: should they be huge, machine-gun laden stop-motion robots,
or cyborgs puzzled together from hydraulics, computer chips and the corpses of
dead policemen? Ronny “The Beast Within”
Cox encourages the former, Miguel “Leviathan”
Ferrer the latter, and it’s up to Dan “Halloween III” O’Herlihy to make the final call!
A small workplace accident ensures that Ferrer’s idea, a
robocop made out of shiny purple-blue plastic and otherwise unusable Peter
Weller parts, will be the one put into development! Ha ha, we all know the rest
of the plot: Robocop slowly recovers his humanity as he battles the thugs who
killed him (or at least his likeable family man Peter Weller persona), and
ultimately takes down the corrupt and murderous Cox!
Ha ha, lots has been written about the picture’s sharp
satirical digs at corporatism! There are indeed a few fake ads for violent
board games and for electric hearts on the layaway plan, and some snippets from
a moronic sit-com called I’d Buy That For
A Dollar, but the film treads curiously lightly on the whole privatization
of the police force thing! It’s certainly an issue in the picture, but the real
dangers of privatization, namely the profit motive getting in the way of the
services, doesn’t really come up!
It’s certainly a violent picture! There’s lots of shooting,
and every bullet takes big chunks out of the person it hits! There’s stabbing
too, and also a scene in which a man is rendered into oatmeal by a little
mishap involving toxic waste! It’s entertaining all the way through, and
fast-paced, and it has a great cast! It’s not action packed, at least not by 21st
century standards, but that’s okay! I’ve still never seen the third installment
of the Robocop series, despite owning
a DVD set containing all three entries, much in the same way I have yet to
bother watching my DVD of Poltergeist III!
Both of them seem like they’ll be watered down and lame!
In closing, I would like to say that the upcoming remake of
this picture looks terrible, and as with the recent remake of another Paul
Verhoeven film, Total Recall, I’m not
going to make any particular effort to see it! In the meantime, I give the
original Robocop three “nee-nee-nee-nee-nees!”
No comments:
Post a Comment