Movie Review: Demolition Man (1993)

Genre: Science Fiction Action Comedy  

Director: Marco Brambilla  

Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, Nigel Hawthorne, Bob Gunton  

Running Time: 115 minutes  

Synopsis: In a crime-infested Los Angeles of 1996, police officer John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone) arrests deranged crime lord Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes), but with high collateral damage. Both are sentenced to years of cryogenic freezing with subliminal rehabilitation. Phoenix awakens in 2032, where Dr. Raymond Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne) lords over a docile and crime-free society but with all pleasures illegal. Phoenix immediately unleashes chaos, forcing the police chief (Bob Gunton) to unfreeze Spartan, who teams up with police officer Lenina Huxley (Sandra Bullock). Bewildered by new societal rules, Spartan revives brute force methods to track down his nemesis.

What Works Well: This eminently quotable genre-mashing adventure has just as much fun deriding a cancel-happy culture as it does poking fun at itself with sturdy comic underpinnings. A society where the police force no longer knows how to fight crime - because there is no crime to fight - sounds utopic until the blandness of defangment surfaces in everything from outlawed cursing to the forgotten pleasures of physical contact. Into this sterility trundle Stallone's Spartan and Snipes' Phoenix as two dinosaur macho men on either side of the law, and they both quickly recognize a paradise worth wrecking. Sandra Bullock adds a sparkle as the bright-eyed police officer weirdly obsessed with the good old days of carnage.

What Does Not Work As Well: The plight of the (literal) underground resistance is short-changed, while the fragments of an abandoned sub-plot related to Spartan's daughter cause confusion. Several scenes double down on over-the-top action, Stallone and Snipes unlikely survivors of repeated unconstrained firepower and explosions. 

Key Quote:
Spartan: I just do my job and things get...
Lenina: ...get demolished.

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