Director: Paul Verhoeven
Cast: Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Neil Patrick Harris
Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. All young people think they’ll have the same buzzy, borderline narcotic feeling for all of Verhoeven’s films that they had when they first saw Robocop (1987)*.
Did I Like It: You can keep your Showgirls (1995) and your Hollow Man (2002), this is as good as late-stage American Verhoeven can get. And this is even excluding the fact that Denise Richards has never been able to get anywhere in the vicinity of being able to act. I can’t say Van Dien is all that better of a performer than his love interest, but Van Dien is at least able to fit into the testosterone heavy parts of the film. I don’t think Richards has ever fit into a role correctly. I must be mellowing in my increasingly older age. Time was, one resoundingly false performance can obliterate an entire movie. I’m not sure when I got to the point where I can look past something like that.
There’s enough of the demented political satire present in Verhoeven’s best to keep things interesting, but you really have to want to get what’s going on in order to get it. Something about the crowd I saw this with made me think that they were resolutely on the side of not just the humans, but the humans with enough moral fortitude to strive for citizenship.
The film is resoundingly on the side of the bugs, and at this point so am I. They’ve made some mistakes, sure, but I don’t think they started traveling among the stars wanting to start any trouble. They were just prepared with trouble when it came.
And I don’t care what the brain bug did, no one deserves that kind of treatment.
*When not edited for TV, naturally.