RoboCop

RoboCop (1987) is Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi action film from Orion Pictures — watch it online on iFILM. Detroit, near future: the mega-corporation OCP has just bought the city's police department.

Patrol officer Alex Murphy, played by Peter Weller, draws the worst beat in town and walks into an ambush set by crime lord Clarence Boddicker. Kurtwood Smith's Boddicker is cold, precise and genuinely frightening. Murphy is killed. OCP engineers take what's left of his body and bolt it into a titanium prototype they call RoboCop. He's back on the streets — fast, armoured, nearly indestructible. Except the man inside keeps having nightmares about his own murder.

Verhoeven built a vicious satire around the action: the privatisation of law enforcement, corporate greed dressed up as civic responsibility, the idea that technology fixes everything. The violence is deliberately over-the-top — a rhetorical tool, not spectacle. Released in July 1987 on a $13 million budget, the film earned over $53 million at the box office and launched a franchise that ran through sequels, animated series and comics. Stream RoboCop (1987) in full online on iFILM.