Critics reviews

If audiences were expecting a grim, foreboding future, they instead a found an entirely different film; a darkly comic media satire brutally transforming itself over 108 minutes into a gory showdown. The film compresses and pressurises soon after the credits and by the first time you see Bixby Snyder's (S.D. Nemeth) nigh-totemic "I'd buy that for a dollar!" catchphrase in paranoiac close-up, the self-aware tone is set

A popcorn riot that remains distressingly topical thirty years after the fact, RoboCopis a testament to the powerful synergy of the director's considerable talents with Hollywood's inherent tastelessness. I'd buy that for a dollar!

The future for Verhoeven is already at hand, the deranged instant when Hollywood's testosterone fixation morphs macho flesh into a literal armor. The motorcycles in Spetters laid the groundwork, Tsukamoto in the Tetsuo series runs the splatter-poetry to its logical conclusion.

[Verhoeven] is far from my favorite director. But he did have one absolutely perfect movie. One film where his signature fascination with gore and gratuitous violence really paid off thematically, while his natural perversity made for an ideal match with the story... With overtones of both Brazil and The Terminator, RoboCop is equal parts satire, tragedy, grand guignol gorefest, and sensitive human drama, and it manages to be a parody of itself even as it delivers the goods.

Verhoeven collapses these fields of discomfort and rupture into a series of brilliant set-pieces that demonstrate the inherent internal contradictions that lie at the heart of American society as Murphy, the gun-wielding zombie of capitol, journeys from the pettiest of street crimes to the heights of corporate evil. Each cut a slap in the face, each shape out of place, ROBOCOP is one of the major achievements of Verhoeven's Sirk-like mastery of the politics of design, composition, and rhythm.

...Paul Verhoeven's ROBOCOP is another movie that gets better with each passing year. For one thing, Verhoeven and screenwriter Ed Neumeier's parody of sensationalist tele-journalism anticipates Fox News in its callousness, bloodlust, and blatant disrespect for the viewer's intelligence. Likewise, the righteous anger behind the film's premise of corporate-sponsored law enforcement feels especially moving in light of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Verhoeven's best and most vulgar American work was still in front of him, but RoboCop still stands as one of the most rude-tempered, rollicking gobs of spit in the face of 1980s politics this side of John Carpenter's They Live.

Totally re-inventing himself, [Verhoeven] hit the jackpot with Robocop... [It's] one of the most fun (and graphic) superhero movies ever made, extrapolating present trends into the near future and commenting on our media-driven culture in the process. It also helped make a star out of Peter Weller, whose deadpan personality fit his mechanical role to a "T".

This film is energetic, visually brilliant and very funny, with a sharp script that is never allowed to hold up the carnage. Its violence is spectacular, totally unrealistic, and – who knows? – perhaps quite therapeutic. All in all, it provides a stimulating evening for those who can jettison the 'cultural baggage'; and a pure delight for those of us who have never had any culture at all.