10 Movies Smarter Than Anyone Wants To Admit
3. Robocop
If there's one thing that 80's action films were really good at, it was disguising higher minded, intellectual fare in the form of dumb, cheesy action movies. And no film better exemplified this than Robocop.
Another Verhoeven classic, this film dealt with a man trying to find and re-contextualize his humanity in a world determined to remove it all. It also features a man getting dumped in acid and then being disintegrated when a car hits his mangled, bloated corpse. Fun times for all.
What made Robocop so great wasn't just its action, though it was spectacular, it was its satire. The bad guys don't really lose in this, because the bad guys are capitalists in America, in the 80's. The bad guys had already won in the world of Robocop, because they had already won in our world. Every inch of this film is taking the ultra capitalist world of Reagan era America and beating it to death with a wiffle ball bat, just so that it takes nice and long.