"I'm happy that you're happy, but the place where you're supposed to have the toilet paper, you've got this little shelf with three seashells on it..."
It’s time to kick off a new year of reviewing with a film that’s about transitioning from one year to another—in this case, into a year where swearing, spicy food, and shaking hands is outlawed, and where Wesley Snipes and Sylvester Stallone are about to start a whole lot of havoc. Thirty years on, here’s a look at what’s part action film and part social satire with Demolition Man.
It’s definitely one of Stallone’s better films from the nineties for my liking—after Rocky 5 (which I don’t think is quite as bad as some make out, even if not great) and Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot (which…is exactly as bad as some make out), he struck back with Cliffhanger and this one. We get a taste of the film’s over the top nature from the opening, set in the impossibly far future of, erm, 1996. It’s a 1996 where apparently Bill Clinton really did spend every waking hour eating Big Macs, as Los Angeles has gone to hell, and super-cop John Spartan is waging a war against psychotic criminal genius Simon Phoenix—played by Wesley Snipes, who is quite clearly having the time of his life with every second he’s on screen.
One thing leads to another, and after a frame-up, Spartan is sentenced to a stint in a cryogenic freezer alongside Phoenix (I guess that’s what developed in this timeline when people weren’t too busy fixing on the OJ Simpson trial). Waking up decades later in the year 2032, both find themselves fish out of water in a metropolis were everyone seems cheerful and content, but only at the expense of everything from speech to culture being sanitized as can possibly be.
Phoenix, with perhaps more motives that it seems, is quite happy to begin wreaking mayhem again, with Spartan having to adapt to a much less rougher system of law enforcement in his effort to stop him. And then there’s Sandra Bullock alongside our hero as retro culture obsessed policewoman Huxley (why yes, that is a rather on the nose reference to one of the obvious inspirations here!)
Compared to a lot of other action schlock around this era, there’s a lot more to talk about with Demolition Man—the future society on offer might seem like a jab at nanny state politics at first, but especially in our current context, you can easily frame it in part as being about gentrification. Undesirables who don’t fit into the ideal here are literally shoved into the sewers, with this being a bigger part of the plot than it seems. In many ways, this take on an overly controlling society makes for a better Judge Dredd film that the one Stallone himself ended up making.
Stallone’s character here is also somewhat more nuanced than the very straightforward tough guys he’s played before—one who clearly doesn’t really like having to take drastic measures to get his man, and is actually willing to make a distinction between psycho-killer perps and someone desperate stealing just for food. That’s a far cry from, say, Cobra.
If there’s any complaint I have, it’s that the film runs out of steam a bit in the last act when the social satire gets exhausted a bit—we end on a big ol’ fight between hero and bad guy, but we’ve already had one big set piece like that in the film, so it feels as if it’s going through the motions a bit. Still, I admit I enjoyed most of it nonetheless—and we leave on a message that actually suggests that perhaps there should be a middle ground between mindless anarchy and stifling control freak societies.
That’s how Demolition Man remains a cult classic three decades on, with memorable dialogue aplenty to boot, and how it stands out from its era. Interestingly enough, both Schwarzenegger and Stallone were making somewhat more deconstructive action pieces in ’93, after the excess of the eighties—but we’ll get to that later. Time to get 2023 rolling…
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