It’s easy to appreciate and enjoy a movie that’s deservedly lauded as a classic, a status that’s applied to Paul Verhoeven’s legendary dystopian sci-fi actioner RoboCop ever since it was first unleashed upon an unsuspecting world 35 years ago.
However, given the nonstop accolades, admiration, and praise to have been lavished on the spectacular shoot ’em up over the decades, it can easily go overlooked that the film boasts one of the most perennially underrated and iconic antagonists in cinematic history, in the wondrously over-the-top form of Kurtwood Smith’s Clarence Boddicker.
Not so much chewing on the scenery as devouring it whole, spitting it out, and then setting fire to it after the fact, the local crime lord is without a doubt a weapons-grade adversary for Peter Weller’s title hero. Everyone loves RoboCop, but Boddicker too often gets let out of the conversation. However ,a recent Reddit thread posted by a recent first-time viewer has ensured that won’t happen again, after the comments and replies became hijacked almost exclusively by the big bad’s long list of memorable quotes.
In fact, nothing sums it up better than the fact the top-voted response at the time of writing simply, succinctly, and with 100 percent accuracy states that “Clarence Boddicker is truly one of the greatest movie villains of all time”. He most definitely is, and it’s a crying shame that a performance which so beautifully toes the line between unnerving menace and outright ham gets shut out of that very discussion on almost every occasion it rears its head.
