[8.3/10] *Robocop* is about corruption and dehumanization. At multiple levels, the film explores what it means to suck the humanity out of something, replace it with some callous cocktail of avarice and technology, and witness the grim results on all sides of the equation when what’s left takes hold. It is an action-packed polemic against private profiteering instead of the public good, of militarized escalation instead of compassion and restrain, of lead and steel instead of flesh and blood.

But it is also a paean to the irrepressibility of those human elements, despite whatever self-serving, nest-feathering malevolence may be permeating 1980s corporate boardrooms. OCP, the evil company there to replace beat cops with robotic officers, tries to erase the soul of the man who has become its product, so that he will be a better tool and a better soldier. And yet his living connections, to his family and to his partner, reawaken and sustain him despite so many efforts to stamp it out.

That thematic heft gives *Robocop* a punch that so many of its fellow 1980s actioners lack. That is director Paul Verhoeven’s gift -- the ability to marry lurid genre thrills and over-the-top action with something a little more piercing, even disturbing, for those willing to fire up their power drills and examine what’s lurking behind the faceplate.

He also knows the sweet spot between exaggeration and realism. Make no mistake, *Robocop* is a maximalist film, full of grand guignol firefights, preening villains, and even bigger emotions. You could easily take it as a film utterly lacking in subtlety. But a major part of what makes the movie work is Verhoeven and company’s ability to blend 1980s ostentatiousness with 1970s rawness. There is grit and grime beneath the four color world that the director and his team create, and that keeps the movie grounded even when it veers into the technologically fantastical or dystopian extremes.

Much of that comes from the heavy-handed but still very effective cinematography. Director of photography, Jost Vacano puts us inside Robocop’s head, something that helps evince empathy for a seemingly emotionless killing machine by nigh-literally putting the audience behind his eyes. He composes several key shots with Murphy or others close to the camera, while some key feature or detail looms in the background, making the human expression the driving image amid dystopic tumult. And he and editor Frank J. Urioste are masters of the reveal, whether it’s for the title character, the hulking but childlike ED-209, or just Murphy’s reconstructed face. In every case, the visual build, constructed shot-by-shot, makes the ultimate unveiling of each that much more impactful.

Those moments are key because the core of the movie stems from the failures and contradictions of these figures. Robocop himself is a tribute to the militarization of law enforcement, a one-man army meant as a tonic to his fleshy counterparts who, by contrast, have too many demands and cannot sustain nearly as much punishment, making them less useful as “product.” There is an utter brutality to the mechanical policeman’s actions, to where he’s not merely stopping crime, but acting as though within an urban war zone. It makes for blood-pumping action, but it carries an implicit critique of how violently he’s programmed to dispense with the citizens who violate his prime directives.

ED-209, on the other hand, represents one of the film’s other potent themes -- a misplaced faith in technology. The imposing, stop-motion animated automaton is also meant to be the next step in both war and policing. Despite that, its mistakes cost lives; it stumbles down a flight of stairs, and when felled, it kicks and cries almost like a baby. These images, alongside news blasts of defense satellites misfiring and Murphy himself breaking through his programming, evince sincere skepticism about technological solutions to human problems and warn of the costs of the missteps inherent in this nascent field.

But it’s that last one, the mortal face beneath the dehumanizing mask that Murphy finally removes, which becomes the cinch of the movie. So many of the film’s villains, from the executives jockeying for position on the corporate ladder to the amoral criminals they’re in league with, treat human life as though it doesn’t matter. The former in particular are a cutting caricature of Ronald Reagan’s America, touting public services turned into corporate money-making schemes.

These same, callous but well-dressed ghouls position Murphy to be their guinea pig, surreptitiously having him sign away his rights and become their property. The implication is that this is all part of a larger plot, one that involves funding thieves and murderers to conjure up a criminal crisis that big business can then step into solve, replete with a lucrative development they can use their mechanical goons to “clean out.” That privatization, driving out city services and the civil servants who deliver them, is framed as draining away the soul of Detroit.

But the mistake, in all of that byznantine plotting, was underestimating that ineffable human quality within those faux-optimized, thoroughly corporatized systems meant to serve stockholders and not the people. However much OCP aimed to stamp out Murphy’s humanity, it could not erase his trauma, his mourning of his family, and his desire to wreak vengeance on those who would inflict such a terrible curse on a man and on a community.

The film centers on that awakening and course correction. When Robocop removes that facemask, it symbolizes the reassertion of the fragile but determined human being behind it. When his partner, Lewis, physically recalibrates his targeting unit, it speaks to the necessity for that individual intervention in these mechanized processes. When he turns on his masters, he embodies the unpredictable elements of the human soul, which defy the sort of craven, heartless projects that Bob and Dick and even Clarence seek to impose. Murphy is their chickens coming home to roost and their sins crashing back down on them all at once, in Verhoeven’s characteristically brutal but bombastic tones.

That is the film’s central irony. Robocop is designed to root out corruption, to dispense justice dispassionately. OCP and its agents mean for that to be a quick extermination of whatever doesn’t serve their interests, fodder for more rent-seeking and smiling P.R. Instead, he inadvertently achieves exactly what he was designed to accomplish, wiping out the corruption that led to his creation, but only when that human passion reasserts itself, and the man within the machine is born again.