The 21st Century’s most dangerous cop.
The 21st Century’s most ruthless criminal.
The year is temporarily 1996. Los Angeles is a fiery hellhole. Criminals run rampant, and the lights and sirens of police cars flash and shriek constantly. John Spartan, detective for the LAPD, is on the trail of his arch nemesis of two years, Simon Phoenix, who has hijacked a bus of thirty passengers and taken them all hostage within an abandoned factory. Spartan bungy jumps in from a helicopter, guns blazing, to take down Phoenix once and for all, but the madman has other plans: he sets fire to the place and the two duke it out, and even though Spartan disarms Phoenix and takes him into custody, Phoenix ultimately has the upper hand, as those thirty hostages have lost their lives in the exploding factory. Spartan is charged with manslaughter for the deaths of the hostages and gets a seventy-year sentence in a cryogenic prison, where he will share ice cube space alongside his greatest enemy. Flash forward 36 years to the year 2032. At a routine parole meeting, during which Phoenix has been defrosted, he breaks out of his restraints and begins wreaking havoc across the new LA – now called San Angeles, revitalized and redubbed by a man named Dr. Raymond Cocteau following a disastrous earthquake. Now inexplicably three times as strong, fluent in Spanish, and adept at computer hacking, Phoenix begins carrying out the orders of the disembodied voice inside his head…orders that command him to kill a man named Edgar Friendly, leader of a rebellion of the disenchanted called “Scraps” who refuse to be part of Dr. Cocteau’s new world order, and who instead live below the streets of San Angeles, emerging only to steal food and knock over lots of restaurant tents and stuff. In a future where violence is almost non-existent, the castrated SAPD doesn’t know what to do, so they defrost the one man who does: John Spartan. Saddled with a new partner – the ‘90s-obsessed Lenina Huxley – Spartan will do battle once again with his foe amid a new futuristic landscape in which he will find himself confused by nearly every technological amenity while proving that the old ways are still the best ways…
Not that the film world has become less intrigued by the potentials of the future, but the late ‘80s/early ’90s were a little too infatuated with the notion of how the world could possibly look in the next century to come. You’ll notice not a single film ever made that was set in the future was a positive one – every novelist, screenwriter, and filmmaker living and dead who dabbled in the make-believe world of the possible had been terrified, and these “what if?” environments shared much in common: cities are uniform, sterile, and manned by slick-looking sentries in tinted masked helmets; interiors are brightly lit like wealthy hospital wards and everyone wears uniformed clothing; no one uses paper, only screens; no one steers their own cars, and sometimes those cars don’t even touch the road upon which they are driving; doors open by themselves, and omniscient computer voices know everything. No one’s ever made a future-set film where the future looks better.
The landscape of Demolition Man sure doesn’t!
The film’s prologue is set only three years into the future and things already look like hammered shit. Way to be optimistic!
Directed by Marco Brambilla (whose only other directorial feature credit is 1997’s Excess Baggage), Demolition Man had a fairly troubled production. Allegedly, though the screenplay’s final credits go to three writers, it was being almost constantly rewritten during shooting (the history of which is so confusing that more than half-a-dozen people, from Night of the Creeps director Fred Dekker to big-chinned actor Craig Scheffer, claim a modicum of story credit), adding and dropping significant subplots depending on the moods of Warner Bros. executives. (For example: in the finished film, John Spartan’s daughter is still alive and well, but he decides not to reunite with her because of how much time has gone by, but earlier versions of the rough cut had her living among the Edgar Friendly “Scraps” and inevitably encountering her father during his trip to the underground. In certain scenes where Spartan is underground and shielding a dirty female with gigantic hair from a burst of gunfire, this seeming bystander who ultimately becomes a random extra was initially meant to be his daughter.)
However, you can’t keep a good concept down, and in spite of its troubled production, Demolition Man results in a fun, funny, and extremely entertaining film that hardly ever stops to take a breath. It’s of the rare breed of action film that’s as comedic as it is filled with carnage and wonderful violence. Nearly every line in some way is meant to be amusing, ironic, or confounding. What’s most comedically appealing about this version of the future is how pussified it’s all become. The San Angeles police department are entirely useless; they answer emergency calls with big smiles plastered on their faces and nary a look of concern. Homicides are so rare that when they occur, they’ve been given the term “murder-death-kills,” because in the future, one person killing another is, like, three times as bad. (“We’re police officers! We’re not trained to handle this kind of violence!”) Things like minor car accidents offer big thrills to the rather bored Lenina Huxley, the film’s unsubtle homage to the famed author of “Brave New World” (title-dropped by Phoenix during his trip to the “Hall of Violence” in the San Andreas museum).
Speaking of unsubtle, all of Demolition Man is. This is a film in which the lead hero gets so pissed off by his nemesis trying to set him on fire that he yell-runs through a pool of burning gasoline just to punch him in the face. This is a film in which it’s established that the hero’s nickname is “Demolition Man” because he’s apparently incapable of carrying out his duties as an LAPD detective without destroying at least one building per assignment (enforced by numerous supporting characters calling him “the Demolition Man,” including his captain, who is “getting tired of this 'Demolition Man' crap”). This is a film that drops a reference to Rambo, but which also stars the guy who was in Rambo…as Rambo. This is a film that kinda-sorta pretends to be “about” something and endeavors to convey the emotional consequences involved with the idea of freezing prisoners and conserving their physical age while the rest of the world ages around them, offering exactly one scene in which Spartan kinda-sorta seems quite upset about being conscious during his time in cryo and seeing his wife “beat her fists against the block of ice that used to be her husband” but who INSTANTLY drops all this not much later when he’s all-too-eager to have sex with Huxley. (“I was wondering if you’d like to have sex.” “OH, YEAH!”) (Speaking of, in the contactless sex sequence, have you ever noticed that, just before they start, Huxley gives him a hand-towel? Is that so he can, you know...wipe himself off once they're done? Eeeeuuuugh.)
Demolition Man may not boast the biggest body count (this title will likely see the least amount of casualties of all the films that appear in this column), but what it sacrifices for bloodletting it makes up for with its humor, which works much more often than it doesn’t. This idea of a future that’s so hell-bent on forcing people to be happy that single use of the word “joy” has become scarce, replaced with “joyjoy” – (“Enjoyjoy your meal, sir”) – is amusing obviously because of how absurd it is, but also doubly so when you realize that this is the caliber of writing with which we’re dealing – that instead of constructing a future where the idea of enforced happiness is subtly suggested, we’re provided this notion of enforced happiness via people saying “joy” twice. And this humor continues, from the curious to the downright surreal: the three seashells joke has become legendary (and is ruined the second your Googling leads you to Stallone’s icky explanation), but it’s the odder alternatives for culture offered in this future that are both comedic and clever – the “oldies” radio station consists of ‘50s-era commercial jingles, like Armor Hotdogs and Jolly Green Giant, and the only restaurant franchise that still exists is Taco Bell (or Pizza Hut, depending on your location in the world), which has become fine dining. Salt, smoking, meat, unlicensed pregnancy, profanity, non-educational toys, physical sex, and high-fiving have become illegal. It would seem that Dr. Cocteau’s douche-bagging of anything the least bit bad for his citizens inadvertently caused anything even suggestive of culture to also come out in the wash.
Along with this scrubbing of culture, something not touched on enough in this alternate future is suggested in exactly one moment during the third act: when speaking with Benjamin Bratt's Alfredo Garcia, Spartan makes a reference to Pancho Villa, to which he responds, “Who?” For most of Spartan’s defrosting, it’s been his pop culture references that have been greeted by blank stares and ignorance, only now it’s his reference to a genuine and significant part of history that someone doesn’t know, and that’s a scary implication of where our future is headed. More of this would have been appreciated, but then again, who needs all that weighty-themes shit when you’ve got scenes of John Spartan flinging a television by its wire into the spine of Simon Phoenix while shouting, “You’re on TV!”
Perhaps the scariest thing about Demolition Man isn’t its lame and neutered look at the future, but that when the film came out in 1993, this prediction of the future was 36 years away. As of this writing, we’re thirty years closer, with only eight more years to go. The future that was presented to us in 1993 is scarily on the path that was predicted, and this can be scientifically confirmed utilizing one strong piece of evidence: people in Demolition Man used tablets with FaceTime capabilities JUST LIKE NOW.
RUN!
Why This Future is Awesome:
- Arnold Schwarzenegger was president.
- Taco Bell is everywhere.
- Denis Leary is living underground, so most of civilization is spared his awful comedy.
- Laserdisc is still the preferred home video format.
- When girls video-call you, their boobs are out.
- The eradication of one-ply toilet paper.
- Girls who look like Sandra Bullock love Jackie Chan movies, fluid transference (eventually), and Lethal Weapon 3.
THE GOOD GUY
John Spartan. LAPD detective. Breeder of destruction. Somewhat-but-not-really conflicted widower. Smoker of Marlboros. Skipper of prison protocol. User of the incredible descriptor “fuck-faced.” Driver of giant cannolis. Knitter of apology sweaters. Dismisser of profanity robots. Exuberant supporter of old-fashioned sex. Emitter of acceptable-smelling breath.
Oh, Stallone, you wonderful action legend. Between Rocky Balboa and John Rambo, you’ve managed to create two culturally significant figures in cinema history, and audiences will always be grateful.
His somewhat recent and successful returns with Rocky Balboa, Creed, and Rambo were worthy returns to his most famous roles, and they reminded people why he was so successful in Hollywood for going on three decades. However The Expendables franchise may have caused fans to lower their opinions of him, Stallone is a great screenwriter and a great director, and he’s earned the right to keep making the films he wants to make until he feels it’s time to step aside. In our current landscape where controversy erupts over the amount of films nominated for Academy Awards that lack the involvement of Black individuals in prominent positions, or the prejudicial behavior toward aging women or even women in general as it pertains to roles they can obtain, somehow it’s still okay for people to joke about guys like Stallone and Schwarzenegger for insisting on maintaining a role in the action genre despite their age. Comments regarding Stallone revisiting the John Rambo character for Rambo: Last Blood, his fifth and purported final entry in the Rambo series, leaned on the disrespectful and irritatingly predictable: “What, does he break out of a retirement home LOL?” And while these same people blindly show enthusiasm for what will soon be the eleventh film in which a group of young beautiful people steal cars and/or money and race around the streets of foreign countries, these commenters will sling these kinds of ignorant condemnations against these icons they grew up watching, who got them into the types of films that have since regressed to the watered-down PG-13 nonsense which has dominated the genre, and frankly, who fucking paved the way for these films of heightened-ridiculousness and über-machoism in the first place. (If you think the Fast and the Furious or John Wick franchises, or any film The Rock has made, would exist without the likes of Stallone or Schwarzenegger, you have a lot to learn.) Ironically, these guys have made belief-suspending films about time-traveling killer assassin cyborgs, or mountain climbers possessing the uncanny ability to kill off a dozen well-trained mercenaries with mountain picks – films now considered classics, and eagerly accepted into the lexicon – but asking audiences to accept that men in their late-60s are capable of running, throwing a punch, and toting a gun is apparently something entirely out of the realm of believability. What pissers.
Anyway, Stallone is a lot of fun here in the very fun film that surrounds him. Demolition Man is stupid, and everyone involved knows it’s stupid, which is why everyone lets loose in their performances without a hint of hesitation. Stallone seems incredibly comfortable as John Spartan, playing a bad-ass with charm, wit, and yeah, even a bit of sex appeal. Even though he manages to show off some decent comedic chops and timing, he’s not an actor who relied on that kind of technique for much of his career, as he’s always been much more serious-minded in his approach to roles and his self-penned screenplays. Despite his Rambo films getting progressively sillier, the John Rambo character never really relied on humor as a crutch – not even in Rambo III, arguably the silliest of the sequels. (Perhaps it’s because of his involvement in Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!, one of the worst things in history, that caused him to hold back on roles of a more comedic nature.)
Comedy aside, Stallone is more than up for all the action elements required: the man knows how to hold a gun, look bad-ass, and run from explosions. If we’re keeping count, Stallone has FOUR slow-motion sequences in which he is either running through fire or from explosions while bellowing that iconic Stallone yell. He was in great shape at this point in his career, so he was still of the mind to show off as much of his (naked) body as possible without reverting back to his brief early career working in stag films. Between Demolition Man and 1994’s The Specialist, in which he shared disconcertingly unsexy sex scenes with Sharon Stone, let’s just say, during the mid-’90s, he more than met his quota of instances in which the camera stopped just above his pubes.
One last thing that bolsters his performance is the incredible on-screen chemistry he shares with his foe, his foil, his dastardly arch nemesis…
THE BAD GUY
Simon Phoenix. Modern-LA crime lord. Future-SA crime lord. Bleacher of heads. Wearer of bumble-bee-colored outfits. Also a smoker of Marlboros. Mocker of Asian tourists. (“Ha ha! Ching chawng ching chawng!”) Future enthusiast. Proud user of the opener “Simon says.” Muser of the accordion. Lover of Jeffrey Dahmer.
The official Simon Phoenix wrap sheet is as follows: four counts of murder; two counts each of rape, assault, grand theft, and robbery; and one count each of possession of a controlled substance, counterfeiting, credit card fraud, driving under the influence, extortion, grand theft, inciting to riot, jury rigging, petty theft, public drunkenness (which becomes more and more hilariously lame when you remember that he’s also a convicted rapist twice over), smuggling, and obviously the best is saved for last: tax evasion (another thing the future got right).
Wesley Snipes is another action actor who was simply not given enough opportunities to show off his talents as a comedic one. (Thankfully Stallone gave him another chance with The Expendables 3, in which Snipes’ character, Doc, steals every scene.) Outside of entertaining and harmless but forgettable titles like Money Train or Drop Zone, Snipes spent most of his career playing serious roles in serious films (King of New York comes to mind), or the kind of silly in which he showed no emotions at all (the Blade trilogy). Without hyperbole, his Simon Phoenix may very well be one of the greatest villains in action film history. There’s no quip cheesy enough and no physicality he won’t incorporate into his performance. An actor legitimately trained in martial artistry, having obtained black belts in Shotokan and Hapkido, Snipes famously had to tame his own fighting techniques on-screen because he moved so fast that the cameras only recorded blurs.
At the start of the film, Snipes is essentially playing a cartoon version of the antagonist he played in New Jack City – that of a crime lord who took over an entire city, out of which he planned on setting up a distribution center for drugs, only now instead of drugs he’s dispensing carnage and blonde hair dye. He warned everyone to stay out of his part of town, including the cops and the postmen, but the damned bus drivers just…wouldn’t…listen.
Wesley Snipes has never been more fun to watch.
IMDB claims the roles of John Spartan and Simon Phoenix were originally offered to Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme, respectively. Though Demolition Man is awesome as it is, seeing this film with this proposed cast would’ve been a different kind of awesome for two reasons: Van Damme makes an excellent villain, and those two action icons can’t fucking stand each other.
THE MURDER-DEATH-KILLS
John Spartan, for all his self-proclamations of being a maniac, manages only a disappointing body count of nine bad guys (four of which were actually blown up by the factory Phoenix set on fire): two dead by gunshot, two by body trauma, and Phoenix's dispatchment from Planet Earth.
Simon Phoenix is the big winner here in terms of murder(-death-kills): he fries thirty hijacked bus passengers, stabs one dude in the brain, commits bodily trauma against two soon-to-be-corpses, kills an off-screen doctor utilizing a mysterious means, tosses Dr. Raymond Cocteau into a fireplace, and according to the automated computer of the SAPD, commits against Warden William Smithers: “severe eye trauma, ruptured spleen, punctured lung, broken rib, internal bleeding” and then rips out the dude’s eyeball.
There are still all kinds of scenes where a hundred dudes get pretty hurt; however, disappointingly, it would seem most of those inflicted were just knocked out. BORING.
THE BEST KILL
Warden Smithers, by far. Phoenix plucks out his eye for the retinal scan security system that will let him walk right out of prison, and the warden’s slow death is broadcast via video into the SAPD station, which allows them all to see just what kind of maniac with whom they must now contend.
THE DAMAGE
Except for some face/body blows, Spartan gets by fine: some future-fun car-crash secure foam rips his clothes; he gets squeezed pretty hard by a giant carnival claw hook; and he endures being body-whipped by a chain. Oh, and the whole framed-for-manslaughter/frozen-for-36-years-while-remaining-conscious thing.
THE BAD GUY’S COMEUPPANCE
At the beginning of the film, Phoenix says, “I’d lose my head if it weren’t attached!”
At the end of the film, Spartan kicks Phoenix’s fucking head off.
THE LINE
“He doesn't know how to use the three seashells!”
THE VERDICT
Ultimately, Demolition Man is the same old stoic-but-human good guy vs. the flamboyant and dynamic bad guy, but it wants to present this classic conflict within the confines of a futuristic landscape to cause our hero and villain both confusion and delight. Sure, lots of the plot points don’t make sense, from the significant–the film asks us to accept that a person can have information uploaded into their brain that makes them physically stronger–to the insignificant–why does Edgar Friendly’s underground rebellion have access to high-tech automated graffiti machines that pop up from the ground and spray their tags on public property, but apparently can’t afford any fucking food? In the end it doesn’t matter, because what we see unfold before us is a lot of fun: Spartan and Phoenix make for a great challenge to each other, Bob Gunton as the SAPD chief once again plays an incredible dick, and the well-meaning but sort of clueless Huxley tries to capture early’90s tough guy vernacular and accidentally says stuff like, “Let’s go blow this guy!”
And that will always provide a joyjoy feeling.
