Review: Demolition Man (1993)

Demolition Man (1993)

Rated R for non-stop action violence, and for strong language

Score: 3 out of 5

Despite coming out well after the '80s "beefcake era" of action movies, in a time when that style was quickly falling out of favor in the face of more grounded films like Die Hard and the films of Steven Seagal, Demolition Man is a film that still gets talked about today, less for its cast or its stunts and more for its unique premise and creative worldbuilding. Taking the plot of your basic '80s sci-fi action flick and dropping it into a seemingly utopian future with a dark side straight out of Brave New World, a book whose author Aldous Huxley is homaged in the name of its female lead, it's a film that's been rediscovered and hailed over the years as a hilarious social satire, a fun sendup of its genre, and even an "anti-woke" classic (even though it... isn't, really?). It's this, more than anything else, that has kept this movie relevant over the years, as while I had plenty of fun watching it at a Popcorn Frights screening, I often found myself wishing that the action was as good as the premise and the comedy, with a lot of the action scenes feeling like they were going through the motions. It's the kind of film that's destined to be a cult classic more than anything, an imperfect action film that's elevated by the unique twists it puts on the basic premise, and is worth checking out for fans of both science fiction and the actors involved.

The film starts out in Los Angeles in the dystopian near-future of 1996, a time when the city has fallen into anarchy, its streets resembling a post-apocalyptic wasteland run by gangs that the LAPD needs military-grade weapons and vehicles to fight. One of its top cops, John Spartan, is basically the closest thing the police have to a super-soldier, an ultimate badass who gets the job done and doesn't care about how much collateral damage he causes in the process. This bites him in the ass when he goes to capture Simon Phoenix, a notorious criminal and all-around psychopath who's kidnapped a bus filled with dozens of people. Spartan may have gotten the job done, but thanks to his carelessness, he got all the hostages killed in the process, and so both he and Phoenix are sent to a "cryo-prison" where they will be frozen for decades, subtly brainwashed all the while so that, when they're thawed out, they'll be productive members of society.

Where the film gets interesting is when it fast-forwards to 2032, where we see that San Angeles, the massive metropolis stretching from San Diego to Santa Barbara with Los Angeles at its center, has completely put the terrible '90s behind it. On the surface, San Angeles is a utopia, a land of clean streets, well-groomed gardens, advanced technology, and an extraordinary standard of living. The visual design is one of the most striking things about the film, framing the future as the kind of beautiful sci-fi city you see in sketches from that time and, more importantly, making it feel real. It's a very '90s future technologically, but even with how consciously sanitized it was, it still felt like a real, lived-in world thanks to some amazing set design. There's always a catch, of course, and the catch here is obvious when we see it: the people of this world are really, really fuckin' c- <*bzzt* YOU ARE FINED ONE CREDIT FOR A VIOLATION OF THE VERBAL MORALITY STATUTE>

...and there you have it. In ending the lawlessness and misery they suffered through in the past, San Angeles threw out the baby with the bathwater and got rid of everything that reminded them of the "bad old days". Cursing, tobacco, red meat, rock music, guns, violence in the media, sexuality just about anywhere, you name it, if society has deemed it harmful in any way, they've banned it and driven those who continue to embrace it literally underground. The result is a world so safe and squeaky-clean that even the police no longer carry guns, having not needed them in years, and so they have no idea what to do when Simon Phoenix gets unfrozen early and proceeds to go on a rampage. I've often seen this movie described as a parody of political correctness (to use the '90s term), but in truth, given how apolitical its writing was, it read more like a Howard Stern-esque mockery of moral crusaders of all stripes, from save-the-world liberals to Bible-thumping conservatives, perhaps best reflected by how they cast Denis Leary as the resistance leader Edgar Friendly basically playing his stock comic persona.

What's more, the intro does a great job showing why society at large might line up and embrace a world like San Angeles. The worldbuilding establishes how this is a city that, underneath its saccharine Brady Bunch surface to use Phoenix's description, has been scarred by the trauma of its past and is willing to do anything to not go back to the chaotic nightmare that existed back then. Coming out of 1993 as this movie did, you can feel shades of how a lot of people at the time justified the "tough on crime" policies that arose from the crime wave of the '70s and '80s, and watching it today, you can see it reflected in how a lot of young people, who've grown up knowing the internet as a cesspool of bullying, bigotry, and toxicity and have spent their childhoods with active shooter drills at school, don't really see "censorship" as a dirty word like their parents do. If people are miserable, and they're given the opportunity to get rid of everything making them miserable, not only will they not care about the hidden costs, they'll think it's worth it. Throughout the film, no matter how comically cringe and uncool San Angeles gets, there's always that prologue, and all of the other horrors of the past that are casually brought up, to remind you of precisely why everybody decided to read Brave New World and think to themselves "y'know, maybe the World State had a point."

The worldbuilding in this was captivating enough, as both a product of its time and as something that still holds up today, that it was a shame the rest of the movie wasn't as good. Wesley Snipes steals the show as the comically over-the-top psycho villain Phoenix, Sandra Bullock was fun to watch as the future cop Lenina Huxley who's nostalgic for the gritty '90s but isn't quite as free of her time's uptight morality as she thinks she is, and while Denis Leary only gets a couple of scenes, his trademark rants are always a good way to make me laugh. Unfortunately, Sylvester Stallone was a weak spot in his own movie and felt like he was on autopilot for most of it. He's mostly playing his usual '80s action movie persona, a character type that he's done better before and since, and the scenes where he reacts with confusion at the world he's stepped into felt like there was a much better action-comedy lurking under the surface, one with him as the roughneck straight man remarking upon the bizarrely sanitized future. Most of that material instead went to Snipes, which is probably why I found Phoenix so entertaining. The subplot about how nearly all of Spartan's friends and family are now dead 36 years later was also treated as an afterthought, brought up a couple of times early on but never really built on after, even though it could've done a lot to flesh out his character beyond "super-cop". I would've liked to see him spend more time interacting with the one elderly cop on the force who still remembers him, or maybe have him try to locate his missing daughter and find that she's still alive, which, however it turned out, could've given him something personal to fight for in the future beyond his beef with Phoenix and his will-they-won't-they romance with Huxley. Nigel Hawthorne also felt wasted as Raymond Cocteau, the leader of San Angeles who released Phoenix in order to take out dissidents. He doesn't get to do much beyond make ominous remarks about social control, and he gets pushed aside quickly during the third act.

The action, too, was of its time, and not in a good way. The only scenes that were really worthwhile were the massive explosion in the prologue and the shootout in the museum, and in the latter's case, that's because it was the only one that really played around with the film's world, as Spartan and Phoenix both head there to get their hands on the only deadly weapons in the city and then proceed to duke it out in an exhibit dedicated to the gangland of '90s Los Angeles. Beyond that, however, the action scenes were all pretty middling, with characters throwing haymakers, shooting wildly, and wrecking cars but never really gripping me as they did so. Maybe I've been spoiled by years of John Wick movies and other modern action films both Hollywood and international that have stepped their game up when it comes to their shootouts, fistfights, and car chases, but this film was an unwelcome reminder that not every mid-budget action programmer from the "golden age of Hollywood action" was a John McTiernan or James Cameron film. There's a reason why this style of action movie was dying by 1993, is all I'm saying.

The Bottom Line

Then again, the action isn't what people remember about this movie. No, that would be the fancy Taco Bell, the three seashells, the fines for cursing, and all the other little details that make this world one of the more interesting sci-fi dystopias ever put to film. If you're a fan of creative science fiction worldbuilding, or you just wanna see Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes duke it out in a thoroughly Disneyfied future that's not prepared for either of them, check this one out.