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The Films of Paul Verhoeven Ranked

On the occasion of Benedetta’s release, we ranked the films of the Dutch auteur, satirist of American excess and fascist ideals.

The Films of Paul Verhoeven Ranked
Photo: IFC Films

During the closing moments of John Carpenter’s 1988 science-fiction classic They Live, a sound collage of news readers and media pundits is unfurled, one of them indignantly blasting the low culture wrought by the likes of George A. Romero and Carpenter himself. It was a none-too-subtle in-joke for fans of said culture, but also a gesture of respect, one craftsman tipping his hat to his peer across the aisle. Had the speaker continued, he might easily have spoken the name of Paul Verhoeven, whose U.S. tour of duty resulted in several of the highest-profile and least respected films of their day.

Verhoeven signed his name to at least two VCR classics (1987’s RoboCop and 1990’s Total Recall), one game changer that dominated media and water-cooler conversations for months on end (1992’s Basic Instinct), and one certified turkey (1995’s Showgirls) whose fate may still be undetermined. While his stock rose and fell several times during his volatile tenure as a Hollywood auteur, his films rarely failed to provoke excitement and contention. Only the bookends (1985’s Flesh+Blood and 2000’s Hollow Man) fail to contribute to the tsunami.

Verhoeven didn’t just arrive in America a fully formed auteur; he began making features that way, arriving at his feature directorial debut, 1971’s Business Is Business, with a favorite set of progressive themes and a flair for instilling even small moments with a swaggering, ramshackle kineticism. Most movie buffs will now associate his name only with rank sensationalism—bare breasts and broken bones—and it isn’t as if he would decline the honor.

But filmed depictions of sex and violence don’t exist within Verhoeven’s purview exclusively. What we may have been responding to was the casualness, bordering on grinning impertinence, with which he deployed images designed to titillate or shock. A girl in 1973’s Turkish Delight lops off the top of a banana before using a spoon to extract the meat. Verhoeven goes after your nervous system the same way, seemingly asking, “Why peel?”

On the occasion of the U.S. theatrical release of Verhoeven’s latest, Benedetta, we ranked the Dutch filmmaker’s films from worst to best. Jaime N. Christley

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on November 9, 2016.

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Hollow Man

17. Hollow Man (2000)

Verhoeven ended his Hollywood residency not with a bang, but with a sigh. Hollow Man was neither big enough or weird enough to provoke a wrathful response from the likes of the Razzies, but time has nevertheless been far less kind to the film than to Verhoeven’s other U.S. assignments, especially with regard to the curiously unfinished quality of its visual effects. In hindsight, we may now look at the film as a vainly foolish attempt to jazz up the legacy of H.G. Wells’s 1897 novel The Invisible Man, but the comforting certainty that the effects in James Whale’s classic 1933 adaptation look far better than the Oscar-nominated work of the 2000 “update” shouldn’t distract from the fact that Hollow Man is also surprisingly mean-spirited for its design as fun, summertime multiplex fare. A work of sad indifference, forever relegated to gas-station DVD racks the world over. Christley


Flesh+Blood

16. Flesh+Blood (1985)

Enthusiasts inspired to dive backward into Verhoeven’s pre-RoboCop career may think they’ve stepped in something when they encounter the director’s English-language debut. A tuneless entry in that decade’s often ill-advised sword-and-sorcery sweepstakes, Flesh+Blood wears the dress of an epic action adventure; underneath there’s a surprisingly convoluted and stagey mess, as if someone took The Hateful Eight and reconfigured it as the worst possible episode of Game of Thrones. The film is shouty, unpleasant, long as heck, and kind of gross. Verhoeven did well to pivot in the direction of sci-fi action with his subsequent work. Christley

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Tricked

15. Tricked (2012)

A crack in the otherwise smooth surface that is the 10-year gap between Black Book and Elle, the anomalous Tricked heralded a more refined, statesmanlike Verhoeven, perfectly adaptable to single-camera televisual storytelling and willing to subsist on a relatively shoestring budget. A melodrama of backstabbery, subterfuge, and, yes, people being tricked, Tricked is neither a triumph nor a masterpiece cloaked in store-bought finery. The narrative tips its hand a little too often to earn the highest marks, but it’s a stock premise executed with delicacy and verve, and, typical of Verhoeven, the women steal it. Christley


Katie Tippel

14. Katie Tippel (1975)

In which a few recurring Verhoeven motifs—humiliated men, objectified women given agency, an unqualified respect for prostitution—are diagrammed with laser precision within the first few minutes, under the auspices of a lavish period setting: Vivre Sa Vie by way of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Curiously, genre expectations put a damper on Verhoeven’s customary inventiveness, and too many scenes, lively as they are in execution, are stifled conceptually, an admirable attempt to reveal hypocrisies in polite, authoritarian society undone by an air of condescension. In its portrayal of a savage time barely redeemed by aspirations toward respectability, Katie Tippel is too often conventional, flat, and not very Verhoeven. Seeds of Showgirls and Black Book abound, but in the same farm league I tend to prefer the lackadaisical morality and gallows humor of Business Is Business. Christley

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The 4th Man

13. The 4th Man (1983)

The last film Verhoeven made in the Netherlands before Black Book, almost a quarter century later, the prickly, deliberately nauseating, and decidedly Polanski-esque The 4th Man bears as a striking familial resemblance to Basic Instinct in more ways than one, with more subtle connections to such distant cousins as Total Recall and Elle. The damaged, alcoholic protagonist (Jeroen Krabbé) is a novelist, rather than a police detective, but the conflated prospects of sex and death represented by the blond femme fatale (Renée Soutendijk) are unmistakably proto-Catherine Tramell. Arguably the most formally accomplished of Verhoeven’s Dutch work, it’s the only one I’d charge with an undue degree of juvenile pretentiousness, so unconvincing is its use of blunt Christian imagery to wag a cosmic finger at a nearly depleted man behaving badly. Christley


Spetters

12. Spetters (1980)

Knowing a little about Verhoeven’s greatest hits might lead you to think that Spetters, from the sound of the title alone, has something to do with arterial blood untimely ripped. The reality? Saturday Night Fever for the motocross racing cults, with “boys will be boys” roughhousing transitioning into inevitably gloomier “we were never the same after that” visits from sexual violence, shattered illusions, and death. A cadre of fresh-faced Breaking Away-type youths attempts to fight off incipient adulthood through their shared love of racing bikes. Not everyone survives, and not everyone who survives does so without scars, inside and out. Uniquely crotch-obsessed, even by Verhoeven standards, the penis-to-breasts ratio in Spetters is, strangely enough, a Larry Clark-ian dead heat. There’s also a brutal male-on-male rape scene that’s as disturbing as the one in Alan Clarke’s Scum—more so, perhaps, for being stitched into a largely by-the-numbers coming-of-age saga. It’s a hallmark of Verhoeven’s art that he offers to the audience unbridled genre kicks and crippling uncertainty in equal doses, and it’s with Spetters that he chose the most circuitous path to arrive there. Christley

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Soldier of Orange

11. Soldier of Orange (1977)

You’d be correct to be grateful that Verhoeven’s career didn’t spin in the direction of realist, prestige fare like Soldier of Orange, the concerns of which—Dutch resistance and collaboration during the Nazi occupation—he revisited much more profitably nearly 30 years later with Black Book. The film is directed with tidy professionalism, and occasional inventiveness, but it inspires little else besides a grudging admiration for its novelistic sturdiness. Soldier of Orange’s worst sin, perhaps, is that it’s overshadowed by the likes of Jean Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows. The film is hard to love but equally hard to fault on general principle, and it’s certainly worth a due-diligence viewing. Christley



Benedetta

10. Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven)

Verhoeven’s Benedetta suggests a covert remake of the director’s 1995 trash masterpiece Showgirls, redressing the Vegas showgirls as late-Renaissance Italian nuns. Both films concern a woman who understands the power of her sex and weaponizes it to her advantage. Benedetta also shares a tone and, to some degree, a structure with Showgirls, as their irony-drenched comic sensibility clashes disconcertingly with a third-act betrayal that results in a rather distressing scene of sexual violence. The intrigue created by Verhoeven’s love of tonal clash and generalized profligacy doesn’t quite save Benedetta from feeling like it’s revealed its entire hand well before the credits roll, but while it’s hot, it’s hot. Pat Brown

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Elle

9. Elle (2016)

The bone-crunching, titty-flashing graphic novel that was Verhoeven’s subterranean dream world during his Hollywood years intrudes on Elle only as a vague memory (and strictly in the graphics of a video game produced by the heroine’s company), a dream we’re not really sure we dreamed. But the complicated plot and fluid sexual politics of Elle are unquestionably the work of a grownup mind unshackled by American studio expectations. Anchored by Isabelle Huppert’s quicksilver lead performance, channeling the spirit of Jeanne Dielman in one moment, Charlize Theron in Jason Reitman’s Young Adult in the next, Elle’s strangely episodic script often feels as if it was improvised day by day, but while the film may not hang together structurally, a biting portrait of feminine resolve emerges as its core truth, with the side benefit of a slyly Buñuelian sense of humor. Christley


Business Is Business

8. Business Is Business (1971)

Neither a proto-Taxi Driver nor the kind of skin flick Travis Bickle habitually attended in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 peek into the seedy underbelly of a metropolis, Verhoeven’s feature debut (after a decade paying his dues with TV work and documentaries) comes packaged as a goofy-face-making T&A comedy, but as an artwork it ekes out something a bit more. The comic hijinks may strike back-catalog explorers as quaint, if not a little crude, but it’s the film’s anti-moralizing attitude toward sex work, and its unwavering confidence in the invincibility of its heroine, that gives Business Is Business an edge over the gritty naïveté that passed for truth-telling in some of the most lauded American films from the same period. Already building from a baseline of sexual-political attitudes that would serve him for decades to come, Verhoeven’s lighthearted saga of the trials and tribulations of a veteran Amsterdam prostitute (Ronnie Bierman) stacks the deck in her favor, while the endless carousel of men never tire of making fools of themselves. Too easily forgotten is Verhoeven’s career-long project to demonstrate that every woman has a touch of Lysistrata. It all started here. Christley

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Showgirls

7. Showgirls (1995)

God herself couldn’t have cashed the checks that were being written in the film’s name in the months leading up to its theatrical release: the then-outrageous $45-million price tag (still inconceivable in conjunction with an NC-17 rating), the cloak of secrecy, the promise of paradigms shifted ever after. Twenty-plus years of dust now more or less settled, I confess I find the film a bit of a tough sit, but I also find it hard not to admire its determination to be freaky and loud and, occasionally, a little old-fashioned. And while a large part of the near-universal derision that rained down on Showgirls was the result of the film risking looking ridiculous at every opportunity, the fact is, we don’t live in a world where Showgirls wins. That is, unless it’s the way that Nomi Malone finally wins “herself” in that surreal, World on a Wire-style universe, where the dream is the stage, and the club is the nightmare. It’s human nature to fear and distrust things we can’t easily categorize, so it’s understandable that we would have rejected out of hand this Brundlefly of Duck Amuck, Footlight Parade, Wild at Heart, and every direct-to-video erotic drama under the sun. Conversely, it’s the film’s wryly cubist structure, a Lament Configuration box for the blinding neon of the Las Vegas strip, that tagged it as a perpetually blank Sudoku puzzle for a certain stripe of auteurist cinephile. Christley


RoboCop

6. RoboCop (1987)

RoboCop is perhaps Verhoeven’s most written-about film, so large does it loom as both a blockbuster nonpareil and a perennially ripe gift basket of thematic meats and candies. (Its early inclusion in the Criterion Collection certainly didn’t harm its ubiquity either.) While its role as me-first 1980s satire is now well-documented (a more suitable companion piece to They Live is hard to imagine), RoboCop remains one of the few Hollywood blockbusters that demonstrated that you could maximize audience pleasure, and the audience’s discomfort with its own pleasure, without having one cancel out the other. You might feel a little sick when the ride is over, but you’re quick to get back in the queue for another go. Christley

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Total Recall

5. Total Recall (1990)

When CPUs began to render anything its operators could visualize, the movies lost one of their most sacred truths, that a special effects shot had the potential to balance perfectly both unreality and tangible there-ness in the same instance. You could believe and disbelieve without losing your sanity; already we’re one step ahead of Total Recall’s mindfucked protagonist. An imaginative expansion of Philip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” this film about fake memories and a real interplanetary crisis now stands redolent with nostalgia, both for its time, as well as for itself. Beneath its show of smoke and mirrors, mercenary babes, and treacherous holograms, Total Recall is about a man who must choose between two possible, contradictory realities. In one timeline, he’s an earthbound schmuck; in the far less likely one, he’s a hero who must save an oppressed people on a faraway planet. He can’t afford to waver, but it’s our privilege to do so. We’re welcome to consider the persistent motif of walls collapsing, subterfuges dissolving, and rugs being pulled out from still more rugs. The film now exists in a twilight of an era in which factory-produced entertainment could still serve as a keyhole into a dimension of weird, through which we might glimpse the otherworldly, and contemplate fondling the third breast. Christley


Turkish Delight

4. Turkish Delight (1973)

Unusually for Verhoeven, Turkish Delight opens with a violent daydream and settles into a story told through flashback, so that the customary Verhoeven-esque viewer destabilization is achieved through blunt confusion, then a kind of jovially rude comedy, and then jumbled chronology. Rutger Hauer’s bohemian sculptor is first introduced as an unscrupulous killer (but it’s just a hangover fantasy), then as a carefree lothario (but that’s just a mask to hide the tears). Less of an arthouse sex movie in the tradition of Last Tango in Paris or The Mother and the Whore and more like Love Story’s filthy doppelgänger, Turkish Delight, in the manner which would become Verhoeven’s trademark, can only feel all of the feelings, all of the time, at max volume. It’s also the truest expression of romantic love Verhoeven has ever made: In the fitting, inexplicably moving final image in a film where the puerile and the sanctified are indivisible, our hero tosses his dead lover’s wig into the back of a garbage truck. Christley

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Basic Instinct

3. Basic Instinct (1992)

Difficult though it might be to push aside the film’s legacy (the boundary-squashing explicitness in its depictions of sex and violence, Sharon Stone’s instant immortality, the crotch shot that was lit like a Technicolor movie musical and treated like Auguste and Louis Lumière’s The Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat), Basic Instinct has a firm place in Verhoeven’s vision of Grand Guignol feminism. And it’s not so strange as a mile-marker of contemporary film noir; like many of its progenitors, it’s about a guy who makes the lethal error of trying to solve a mystery by thinking with his dick, and a woman who blinds him using nothing more or less than his own gaze as her weapon of choice. In summary, it’s another Verhoeven film about female objectification, and he’s got a female character in the pilot’s seat. The director’s strategy can be described here as “just enough too-muchness,” an almost demure deployment of highly stylized lighting, music, and camerawork to complement, enliven, and occasionally countermand the kick-to-the-nuts bassline that is Joe Esterhaz’s cornfed, pheromone-drenched screenplay. Christley


Black Book

2. Black Book (2006)

Verhoeven directed almost no films without screenwriter Gerard Soeteman until RoboCop, but he reunited with him for his triumphant 2006 return to the Netherlands, taking for himself his first writing credit since Flesh+Blood. It’s no surprise, then, that the two collaborators, inseparable but for a 21-year gap, crafted an epic, female-centered war film ripped straight from their hearts. And while it would be a disservice to a career output as rich and fearless as Verhoeven’s to claim that Black Book is his most personal work, the film’s bold manifestation of feminine resolve twisted with the tortured pride and shame of Dutch nationalism indicates some high-water mark not likely to be surpassed. It’s no prestige show pony either, despite what its many accolades may suggest: Verhoeven took the lessons learned under the tutelage of efficiency-obsessed Hollywood and applied them to content exhaustively explored by Soldier of Orange, and crowned an almost fat-free 145 minutes with a star-making performance by Carice van Houten. Christley

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Starship Troopers

1. Starship Troopers (1997)

Even controlling for Titanic, that Verhoeven’s richest and funniest sci-fi venture failed to dominate the 1997 box office remains one of the great mysteries of mass taste. Defeated by the likes of Jungle 2 Jungle and a remake of Flubber, the Robert A. Heinlein adaptation found redemption and resurrection on video, and a spiritual sequel in 2014’s timeline-scrambling Edge of Tomorrow. Limp box office aside, Starship Troopers, which reunited Verhoeven with RoboCop scribe Ed Neumeier, witnesses Verhoeven at his most empowered, equally by resources and populist content. He wasn’t defeated when Showgirls got the cold shoulder; if anything, he was further emboldened by the experience of crafting that kaleidoscopic maelstrom. Genuflecting in the direction of Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, the result is one of the great miracles of pop cinema, a cutting satire that despises manifest destiny as much as it thrills to the sight of victory through teamwork and pluck. Hitting the highest marks both as an ultraviolent interplanetary theme-park ride, as well as a satire of plus-sized military intervention, the film is a textbook example of having your cake and eating it too. The less-discussed miracle is that its outlandish love battles, acted out by department-store mannequins with impossibly burnished cheekbones, provide a genuine emotional undercurrent to all the earsplitting spectacle. Christley

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