Released in 1987 in anticipation of an expected urban crime wave that never arrived in America, Paul Verhoeven’s near-future social satire nonetheless remains a sharp indictment of the practice of outsourcing justice and a reminder that weapons are made to be used.

“Old Detroit,” as it is called, is a necropolis only inhabited by predators and prey. But it is about to be bulldozed and replaced by the corporate urban center known as Delta City, courtesy of the greedy overlords at Omni Consumer Products. In order to clear the area of criminals so that they can start reaping profits, the fine folks at OCP have built a robotic crime fighter that they are about to unleash. But the bot badly malfunctions, gunning down an OCP exec. “I’m very disappointed,” says one of the corporate honchos in a hilariously deadpan line, as the employee lies dead on a conference table. But an ambitious, immoral fellow exec (Miguel Ferrer) has an answer. Create a cyborg that incorporates the best of technology with the human brain. He gets the opportunity to hatch his plot when a young cop named Murphy (Peter Weller) is shot to pieces by brutal thugs. Wires and microchips soon transform him into RoboCop. Of course, there are complications when the Singularity arrives, and the erstwhile Murphy soon becomes difficult to control.

As mentioned, RoboCop was made at a moment when crime was rising in the country and every last expert was predicting a continued spike. That never happened (and some of the theories for the decline are controversial). But the film isn’t just concerned with momentary social problems. It also deftly sends up America’s lingering Cold War mentality, which demands that we police the entire world, even when we have to outsource much of the nasty business, as we’ve done recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Greek chorus of the film is a series of parodies of TV news and commercials that comment on the action; in one of the latter, a game called “Nukem” is advertised as the kind of good family fun in which “you get them before they get you.” That’s the mentality RoboCop employs when he initially goes rogue, rationalizing that “somewhere there is a crime happening.” There always is.•