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by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

It's time we discuss something, and I think I'm the only person alive with the guts to say it: RoboCop is political. Your hatred and confusion will only make me stronger. End of blurb.

Additionally: I've seen RoboCop dozens of times and always forget how violent the film is. I know it's a Hard R-action film, but still get off guard when directly faced with Rob Bottin's grisly practical effect of Peter Weller's human hand being blown off, before it's replaced by a RoboHand. The man in the famous board room scene, realizing he's about to be shredded by the ED-209, screams uncomfortably long and loud before the countdown reaches zero. The details remain clear between viewings, but their potency still kicks my butt when I'm actually sitting in front of a TV, watching a person emerge from a vat of chemicals.

It would have been easier to make a satire that weirdos wouldn't find genuinely cool, that wouldn't deliver some perverse pleasure as it delivered that scene where RoboCop to shoot that dude in the dick, but Paul Verhoeven, of course, keeps going. He delivers grotesque shot after shot until you could, if you wanted to, turn your brain off enough to ignore the film's story about privatized hospitals and cops as the bullets fly and Kurtwood Smith yells about working for Dick Jones, Dick Jones! You could blow a decade and tens of thousands of crowdfunded dollars on a statue of RoboCop without dealing with what the character's first and only good film has to say about cops (or robots, for that matter).

I think something that gets lost in the exhausting conversations about the extent and direction of RoboCop's political leanings is the inability for any action movie to be at least somewhat political, which is to say that the conversations could be even more exhausting. The other two original, franchise-spawning action hits that sat near RoboCop on 1987's list of top grossing films were Predator and Lethal Weapon. One of those is about an American military squad covertly heading into an anonymous South American country to stop a Soviet coup and the other is about a "Shadow Company" of Vietnam vets and former CIA agents who used the black ops skills they learned overseas to start a heroin trafficking ring in Los Angeles. Maybe Shane Black wasn't thinking about any of this when he wrote Lethal Weapon, but it's always been more difficult to pretend there's nothing worth examining when a cop shoots a person committing a crime and makes a quip than it is to examine what that action means to our relationship with cops in real life.

RoboCop is smart, but it's also cool, and few action movies pull that off. I never get sick of watching RoboCop spin his gun around and holster it in his leg. He does that because when he was just regular ol' HumaCop Alex Murphy, his kid was in love with a show, T.J. Lazer, where the cop hero did the same move, and, again, it's just as easy to break that down as a comment on the way we make cops seem slick so we don't have to deal with who they actually are, the way we model ourselves off fiction that has no bearing on reality, the way public perception blah blah blah... as it is to enjoy a cool special effect.

This is one of the few graces allowed in the Verhoeven filmography, as blunt a body of work as any other. It's what lets him indulge in the grotesque kills while criticizing a structure that would let all these people run around killing each other grotesquely. Nobody would ever call RoboCop a subtle film, but there's a reason a movie this focused on the ways a government can be bought off by private interests was spun-off into multiple animated kids shows. It's not that enjoying RoboCop as a straightforward action movie is missing the point, it's that there are multiple, often conflicting points. Take them however you want.

Think about that next time you watch a gory, violent movie from a Mel Gibson- or Michael Haneke-type, when Hacksaw Ridge shouts at you that violence is bad after a bunch of lovingly crafted shots of people with their guts hanging out or begs you to see its characters' humanity while presenting the Japanese army as a blank mass of killers, when Funny Games kills a kid and stomps around moaning "Look what you made me do," when anything Gibson stars in argues that people with guns are bad but the only effective way to stop them is by having a bigger gun. Verhoeven and his team go over the top both because it helps sell their messages and because going over the top is fun as hell. Practical effects of random goons splattering against windshields is a good time. The movie is this high on our list because it's smart and because he has a gun that goes BDRAAAP BDRAAAP all cool. Those two things don't cancel each other out. They add up to make RoboCop.