Robocop

"Robocop" is Paul Verhoeven's nice little satire of corporatization. It's witty and affably small for a movie of its type, but it's also very thin. The Detroit slum villains (who are, notably, forty-year-old white men) are lusciously sadistic like the comic book bad guys they are supposedly meant to reflect, but the heroes (when stripped of their metal chasis) aren't particularly interesting. Peter Weller is a good, straight-man satirist when his vocoder is in place, but his partner in the police force, played by Nancy Allen, has the faintness of a plot device. Some of the framework of the plot is likewise shoddy, but it's mostly swept underneath the carpet of clever direction and fluky action sequences. The vaguely overcast cyberpunk atmosphere is gloomy, but it's a tasty little action confection that's very easy to swallow.