Your move!

Robocop with Peter Weller. I of course have seen this movie many times before this post but because it is such a good movie I am compelled to review it. Why is it so good? Because it's gritty, darkly satirical and just plain awesome. There's no dichotomy of good and evil; the creator of Robocop is a ruthless entrepreneur who celebrates his success with hookers and cocaine. Incidentally, his death scene, which I had completely taken out of context as a child, likely shaped my attitude on drugs: the man snorting cocaine out a a prostitute's cleavage gets shot in the legs and blown up with a grenade. More effective message than anything DARE ever taught. Robocop fights all forms of crime: robbery, rape, murder, drug trafficking, corporate crimes, he does it all. What's more, you're made to hate each villain well before they're oh so gruesomely killed. There's never any ambiguity in his reasons for killing them. He only uses enough force to complete his mission and he always waits for the bad guys to initiate hostilities, "Your move, creep." Though his tactics are extreme you can never say anyone was a victim of police brutality at the hands of Robocop. Then again, he never misses. I think it's also interesting that while some people would had to have claimed police brutality against him, because he's not human he cannot be personally tried for it. And if that technicality were ignored he wouldn't be protected by city lawyers but by OCP. Their expert legal team would defeat any case filed against him. So the instrument of good is protected from the litigious by an evil corporation. That's just cool. Which brings me to the reason why this movie is unique: the bad guys hardly ever come close to winning. They didn't follow the formula of the powerful protagonist being indestructible at first and only later in the film do the bad guys discover his weakness. Robocop has no weakness, except Directive 4. Even when pitted against the superior strength and firepower of ED-209 he's barely scratched. It takes a whole precinct of cops armed with armor piercing rounds to just slow him down. And even then that's the good guys turned against him that do the most damage. That's why, among other reasons the sequels weren't very good. The unique thing about Robocop as a superhero was that he actually was so powerful he couldn't be defeated.
I watched this movie because I was in a pissy mood, and as always it cheered me up. You wouldn't think it a feel-good flick, but it made me feel good.
Finally, out of curiosity, I checked out how the Spanish and French dubbed ED-209 sounded and to my amazement the French one actually sounded scarier than the Spanish one. Which is saying something considering he just sounds like an angry power droid.