DEMOLITION MAN
A film review by Jason John Seaver
Copyright 1993 Jason John Seaver
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock,
Nigel Hawthorne, Denis Leary
Director: Marco Brambilla
Writers: Daniel Waters, Robert Reneau, Peter M. Lenkov
Rating: R (Violence, profanity, nudity)
Combine KNIGHT RIDER 2000 and CROCODILE DUNDEE with a tiny bit of BRAVE NEW WORLD, and the result will, for better or worse, be something like Silver Pictures' new action comedy, DEMOLITION MAN. In this case, it manages to be better than several of its components, although the writers have an unfortunate tendency to play it safe a little too often.
The movie opens in 1996 as LAPD sergeant John "Demolition Man" Spartan heads into his final confrontation with Simon Phoenix, a sociopathic criminal he's been trying to collar for two years. Though Phoenix is captured, the warehouse he was using as his headquarters is completely destroyed, and more than twenty hostages are found dead in the wreckage. Both men are sentenced to cryo-prison, where they will be placed in suspended animation, having rehabilitation work fed directly into their minds.
Thirty-six years later, Phoenix escapes when thawed out for a parole hearing. Within two hours he's killed seventeen people; a development for which the San Angeles (much of LA was leveled by "the big one of 2010," LA and several other cities have become the idyllic San Angeles metroplex) Police Department, which hasn't had to deal with a "Murder Death Kill" in twenty years, is woefully unprepared. Luckily, the cop who brought Phoenix in last time is in cold storage....
The producers must be congratulated for going out on a limb here. While people would have paid to see a movie that was little more than a two-hour shootout between Stallone and Snipes, the movie has a satirical bent. It pokes fun at formulaic action movies--someone actually comments on a one-liner thrown out in the middle of a fight, and when Spartan gets angry at being regarded as some sort of action-movie stereotype, the speaker simply switches him from the "macho he-man" stereotype to the "brooding loner" ideal. The dwindling American attention span has been extrapolated to where fifteen-second commercials are the most popular music. The fear of intimacy being created in the AIDS era has extended to the point where nobody ever touches each other, not even to shake hands. What some observers see as a disturbing trend to sacrifice freedom for safety in America today is pervasive. The names "Spartan" and "Phoenix" actually seem to be chosen with something in mind, and an "underground" movement is to be taken literally. Stallone and Snipes look like photographic negatives of each other early on in the movie.
However, many of the interesting questions that could be raised in this movie are given lightweight treatment. Spartan had a wife and daughter, and though his spouse's death is one of the first things he learns when being revived, he doesn't seem to react much. Spartan mentions a nightmare that lasted thirty years, and Phoenix had a similar experience, but little is made out of it. And though at least some explanation is offered for the radical changes in society (better than with most movies of this genre, most recently typified by Fortress), it doesn't quite seem adequate. And is the sterile environment limited to San Angeles, or does it extend to all of California/ the United States/North America/western civilization/the world? Also, it would seem that Spartan has more in common with Phoenix than anyone else in this future, but little is done with this.
The action is well-shot, and the special effects are pretty seemless. They even showed a metric temperature reading that didn't say "degrees Kelvin," although the object in question was a 1 K without any visible insulation. The acting is tolerable. Stallone, though somewhat wooden, has learned a lot about playing the straight man from his brief foray into comedy, and pulls off his lines here without embarrassment, and actually managing to elicit quite a few laughs. Wesley Snipes throws caution to the wind as Simon Phoenix with an over-the-top portrayal of the insane criminal mastermind. Bullock is fairly poor, but it fits with the character she plays. Hawthorne is passable, and half of Denis Leary's four scenes are more or less carried by material straight out of his stand-up routine (he even starts pacing back and forth). Rob Schnieder from Saturday Night Live also shows up as a character who might have escaped from an SNL skit about bureaucrats you want to punch out on sight.
DEMOLITION MAN falls in the 7.0-7.5 range. It's more clever than the average action movie, but missed several opportunities.
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