Directed by Marco Brambilla
Written by Daniel Waters and Robert Reneau and Peter M. Lenkov
1993 | 115 minutes | English
DVD

Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, Nigel Hawthorne, Benjamin Bratt, Dennis Leary, Bill Cobbs, Bob Gunton, Glenn Shadix, Troy Evans, Steve Kahan, Andre Gregory, Jesse Ventura, Jack Black, Rob Schneider, David Patrick Kelley

What it’s about: In the year 1996, rogue LAPD officer John Spartan (Stallone) is put into cryogenic sleep as a prison sentence after a number of civilians are killed during his apprehension of psychotic criminal Simon Phoenix (Snipes). In 2032, the also-frozen Phoenix escapes, wreaking havoc in the fascistic pseudo-utopia society has become, and contemporary cops–more used to dealing with curfew violations and curbing foul language–are unequipped to deal with his kind of chaotic violence. Lt. Lenina Huxley (Bullock), obsessed with the 20th century, suggests reawakening Spartan to deal with the menace, and partners up with him to help him find Phoenix while adjusting to an unfamiliar world of enforced civility and politeness. Phoenix’s escape was engineered by the dictatorial Dr. Raymond Cocteau (Hawthorne) as a means of eliminating Edgar Friendly (Leary), leader of a group of rebels who reject his new world order. But Cocteau may have unleashed a weapon he can’t control, and it’s up to the primitive “Demolition Man” to uncover the truth and save the future.

Reflections: The first two words that come to mind for this movie are “gloriously stupid.” It’s clearly intended to be satire, but it’s so broad and unsubtle, it’s difficult to say that it really lands. But in a way, that’s kind of what’s fun about it, watching it from nearly the future in which it’s set–the exaggerations of the anxieties of early ’90s culture feel sort of quaint, which makes it funnier now than it was even when I saw it several years after it came out. There is also an odd prescience to some of it–for example, the reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming president was intended to metatextually play on the rivalry between him and Stallone, a decade before he actually became governor of California.

The plot hits all the expected beats with little apparent interest in being surprising, and none of the characters have much to them, but the actors seem to be having fun. Stallone is in meathead-with-a-heart-of-gold mode, Bullock is playing up the perky naivete and grinning through her character’s frequent malapropisms, and Snipes is clearly relishing cartoonishly chewing the scenery at every turn. The supporting cast is sort of wild: did I expect to ever see Wesley Snipes beating up Andre Gregory? No, but it happens. Jack Black has an early, non-speaking background role. Dennis Leary tells Glenn Shadix he looks like a couch. Rob Schneider is… there. The action is about what you’d expect from a movie of this era, with a few particularly cool moments–Phoenix’s inevitable death scene, for example–and the effects hold up reasonably well, with a certain practical charm and ’90s dirtiness to them, even amidst the sleek sci-fi designs of the ultra-clean and tidy city.

There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense: references to Spartan having a daughter who might still be alive never pay off, a lot of the apparent laws and technologies raise serious logistical questions, the reference to Rambo in a movie starring Stallone is… confusing. But this is not a movie for thinking about that kind of thing, or much else. This is a movie for turning your brain off, watching stuff blow up, and laughing at the bizarre and, at this point, nostalgic retrofuturism. I haven’t seen it since I was a teenager, but I had a good time with it and some genuine laughs. And I kind of want some Taco Bell now, so I guess it got me.