RoboCop

By VARIETY STAFF

Executive Producer, Jon Davison. Director Paul Verhoeven; Producer Arne Schmidt; Screenplay Edward Neumeier, Michael Miner.
 
Peter Weller
Nancy Allen
Ronny Cox
Kurtwood Smith
Dan O'Herlihy
Miguel Ferrer
 

RoboCop is a comic book movie that's definitely not for kids. The welding of extreme violence with four-letter words is tempered with gut-level humor and technical wizardry.

Roller-coaster ride begins with the near-dismemberment of recently transferred police officer Murphy (Peter Weller), to the southern precinct of the Detroit Police Dept in the not-too-distant future.

There are three organizations inextricably wound into Detroit's anarchical society - the police, a band of sadistic hoodlums, and a multinational conglomerate which has a contract with the city to run the police force.

Weller is blown to bits just at the time an ambitious junior exec at the multinational is ready to develop a prototype cyborg - half-man, half-machine programmed to be an indestructable cop. Thus Weller becomes RoboCop, unleashed to fell the human scum he encounters, not the least among them his killers.

As sicko sadists go, Kurtwood Smith is a well-cast adversary. Nancy Allen as Weller's partner (before he died) provides the only warmth in the film, wanting and encouraging RoboCop to listen to some of the human spirit that survived inside him. RoboCop is as tightly worked as a film can be, not a moment or line wasted.

1987: Special Award (sound effects editing)

Nominations: Best Editing, Sound

Camera (Color) , Jost Vacano; Editor, Frank J. Urioste; Music, Basil Poledouris; Art Director, William Sandell. Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1987. Running time: 103 MIN.