You can famously buy a house in Detroit for less than $15,000, but you’ll need the money you save to staunch the bleeding after thugs switch the streets signs around to lead you into a dead end and carjack you. On the plus side, there are lots of abandoned buildings in which to play hockey, as long as you don’t mind skating around hobo corpses.
Perhaps no film celebrates this dystopian hellscape like Robocop, which came out in 1987, when things were actually still relatively nice there, before the stray dogs developed a taste for human flesh. Clearly the cyborg policeman is just as synonymous with Detroit as the Italian with a speech impediment is with Philadelphia. And yet still, the mayor refuses to listen to reason. Stop standing in the way of progress, man, you’re gonna end up just like ED-209.
I think the most apt commentary on Detroit was that after I wrote that headline, I imagined the mayor of Detroit literally shooting down a Robocop statue with an M-60 from his hip like Chuck Norris. God that would be awesome.
Dear Detroit, if you can claim Eminem as a cultural landmark in a Super Bowl commercial, surely you can build a Robocop statue. Make Eminem pay for it if you have to. Sincerely, Everyone.
Lose yourself in unemployment, the homeless, industry? You let it go… You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow, Robocop, comes once in a lifetime…