Demolition Man

Stallone and Snipes are frozen in the semi-futuristic past of 1996.  Snipes for taking hostages and causing your usual chaos and destruction.  Stallone for accidentally causing the death of those innocent hostages.  The funny part is that you have no idea what the hell is going on and never see the hostages so you don’t care very much.  But that’s Demolition Man for ya.

So sometime a while back scientists developed a way to freeze people successfully.  The police thought this technology would work great for criminals so that’s what they used it for.  Snipes and Stallone are put away in CryoPrison (that’s a cool name) for 50 years.  Fast forward to 2032 San Angeles, yeah Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and San Diego were merged.  I guess Santa Angeles Los Diego San Barbara doesn’t roll off the tongue.  And just like most futures in movies in general, it kinda sucks.  But it’s not in that evil corporation or total anarchy way.  In this future everything is tranquil.  There’s pretty much no crime, the city is all clean, cars drive themselves and everyone acts very nice towards each other.  Ok so it doesn’t totally suck.  But meat, cigarettes, alcohol, contact sports, caffeine, spicy food, gasoline, uneducational toys, chocolate, abortion, pregnancy (without a license) and bad language are outlawed.  You can’t eat shit, you can’t drink shit, you can’t play shit, you can’t smoke shit, you can’t bang shit, you can’t abort shit and you can’t say fucking shit.  That sounds fucking awful.  How did the future get so fucked up?  And there are these little boxes on the walls everywhere that let you know whenever you’re violating one of these laws.  A very irritating *beep* will sound and tell you that you’ve been fined.  Man that shit sucks.  I hope this doesn’t really happen ‘cause I plan on doing a lot of those things in the future.

Anyway Simon Phoenix (Snipes) is thawed out after only 36 years (2032-1996≠50) for his parole hearing.  Now this begs a couple of questions.  What if Phoenix doesn’t get paroled?  Do they just refreeze him?  Can they thaw and refreeze inmates as many times as they want?  If they do then that must fuck up their bodies.  Maybe you can only thaw someone once and then if they don’t make parole they have regular jail with iron bars.  And also if you’re freezing people the whole idea of parole doesn’t make any sense.  A criminal is supposed to think about his crime and his life while he’s locked up.  He’s also supposed to act nice and not cause any trouble.  If he behaves then he gets paroled.  If he ends up ass raping some dude and shanks him then he doesn’t get paroled.  When you’re frozen how are you supposed to do any of that?  When they thaw you out you must think, “where am I?  What the fuck year is it?  How did The Sopranos end?”  Not, “oh man, while I was frozen I had a lot of time to think about what I did and I’m sorry.  So what ever happened with Beecher and Keller?”

So Phoenix gets loose, kills the guards and escapes.  Now San Angeles hasn’t seen any sort of real crime in a long time so they’re flabbergasted to see murders, called Murder Death Kills.  What is it with this movie and combining terms?  One of the older cops recognizes Phoenix and tells them that he was a real badass back in the day and couldn’t be caught.  In the end it came down to one man, John Spartan (Stallone).  They called him the “Demolition Man”.

Oh, did I mention that Sandra Bullock (Speed, The Blind Side) is in this also?  Well she is.  Her character is Lenina Huxley and she likes everything “retro”.  Actually she doesn’t like anything past the early 90’s.  But luckily for her Lethal Weapon 3 came out in 1992 so she has a movie poster of it hanging in her office.  Not the best movie the filmmakers could have stuck in there.  It’s not the best action movie either.  Actually it’s not even the best Lethal Weapon picture.  Come to think of it, it’s not the best Mel Gibson movie or Danny Glover movie or Joe Pesci movie or Richard Donner movie.  What the fuck?  Ok, the legendary Joel Silver who produced Demolition Man also produced Lethal Weapon 3 the previous year.  And with that knowledge it’s actually kind of a funny thing to have in there.  Like he thought in the future that Lethal Weapon 3 would be such a revered classic.

Getting back to the story, Huxley is the one that convinces her boss (Bob Gunton (The Shawshank Redemption, Broken Arrow, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls)) to thaw Spartan out so he can catch Phoenix again.  So they defrost him and of course Spartan is up for it.

Did I also forget to mention that Benjamin Bratt (Miss Congeniality, The River Wild) has a part in this?  Oh and Rob Schneider?  And Denis Leary?  Wait, hold on.  What the hell kind of cast is this?  And Schneider is in Judge Dredd too so I guess Stallone likes him.

Anyway, Phoenix causes all kinds of destruction in the city.  We learn later that he was given messages while he was frozen so he would know what passwords to use to escape and where he could find weapons.  His main goal is to kill Denis Leary because he is the leader of an underground gang/society.  He steals food from Taco Bell and paints graffiti on walls.  Yeah, you read right.  Taco Bell is the only restaurant left (in the world?) so that’s what everyone eats.  Helluva plug guys.  Leary does all of this because he rejects the society that has developed in 2032 so he decides not to be a part of it and lives underground.

My favorite part of the movie is the fight in the museum.  Phoenix is programmed to get some guns even though I think he would probably try to get them anyway.  There are no guns in this new society but they have them on display in the “Hall of Violence” at the local museum.  It starts out pretty cool with Phoenix throwing a guy through a glass window to get to them.  Spartan shows up shortly thereafter and they go at it.  But Phoenix doesn’t look surprised to see him.  In fact it’s like he was expecting him.  There’s no shock or wonder, he just sees him and starts blazing away.  So after they shoot at each other they eventually go into one of the displays set to what looks like an 80’s back alley with an old car, a fire hydrant (with water hooked up to it?), a storefront, a TV, tools and so on.  They do some hand to hand and continue the fight for a while but Phoenix eventually runs away.

The action in this movie isn’t bad but it’s not spectacular either.  The car chase and the fight at the end are alright but it’s not great.  At least they had three separate scenes with Stallone and Snipes fighting hand to hand but they weren’t staged all that well.  It looks like Phoenix should kick Spartan’s ass every time but they had to have Spartan win so I think it comes off kinda weird.

The thing is that the action is shot pretty well though.  I think it would have been better if they had just set it to modern day instead of the future.  Everything besides the fighting is annoying or uninteresting.  Huxley keeps screwing up “retro” sayings like “you can take this job and you can shovel it” or “let’s go blow this guy”.  It’s very contrived humor.  Like that they tell you that Schwarzenegger actually became president at some point in the past.  There’s too much winking at the camera.  It’s shit like this that really gets to me and takes me out of the movie too much.  I want this to be serious and at times it is serious but there are other times that you can hear the filmmakers giggling to each other. 

The best parts of the movie are the beginning scene that takes place in 1996 and the scene where they fight in the museum going into that retro display.  It seemed like they tried so hard to get these guys into a setting that made sense and they resorted to placing them in some set piece in a museum or in an underground city that looks more like a modern day metropolis.  Why not just set the thing in modern day 1994?  I really think it would have turned out a lot better. 

And the year 2032 doesn’t make sense.  36 years isn’t enough time to completely change an entire country’s society around.  They talk about the 90’s in this movie like they happened at least a hundred years ago.  But really a bunch of people in this movie had to have been born in the 90’s or 2000’s.  Their parents lived through that time period.  No one really seems to remember what it was like a little over 30 years ago.  It would have been better to make it 2132 or 2232.  But 36 years?  Really?  That’s not very far into the future guys.  Alright I know it’s just a number but they fucked up something as simple as picking an arbitrary year.  It’s just weird man.

This movie and Stallone’s previous film, Cliffhanger, are kind of similar in feel.  I guess they’re about equal overall and they just seem churned out.  It feels like there wasn’t a whole lot of thought put into any one area.  They just made sure that it was nice to look at and somewhat comprehendible.  Stallone didn’t look so into it in Cliffhanger and it’s the same in this.  I think you can tell when he really cares like in Rocky II or Cop Land.  In Demolition Man he gives what he can but doesn’t go the extra mile.  But it is funny to see him run towards the camera in slow motion with an explosion behind him while yelling and making that classic Stallone squished face because he’s shouting at the top of his lungs.  He does that a lot in this movie by the way.

Snipes looks like he’s having some fun though.  He makes Phoenix very animated and like he’s just taken a fucking huge hit of coke all the time.  He’s so hyper and talks so fast and so much.  This was a bit of a different character for him to do.  He’s usually more laid back and smooth.  And he usually doesn’t play bad guys either (he was great as the bad guy in New Jack City though) so that’s an interesting thing to see.

The director for this is Marco Brambilla.  This was his first film and the only other one he did was Excess Baggage (yikes).  He also did the Diontopia TV miniseries which I didn’t see.  But this was a good effort for someone’s first directing job and from the looks of it someone who doesn’t really direct very much at all.  He’s more of an artist and has had his works displayed in the Guggenheim, the San Francisco Museum of Art and the New Contemporary Museum of Art in New York City.  The museum shootout scene must have been a coincidence though because I think he did his main artwork after Demolition Man but I guess it still could’ve been his idea if he just really likes museums.  Also I wonder if he boasts that he directed Demolition Man to snobby art critics. 

Anyway like I said before this movie is actually shot fairly well and I like the idea of Stallone and Snipes together in a film.  The action’s fine and the rest of the movie moves along alright even though it can drag a bit sometimes.  Bullock and almost everyone else (besides Stallone and Snipes) gets on your nerves after a while because they’re complete wimps.  It’s annoying when most of the characters in the film you’re watching are helpless.  And it’s not like they really learn how to deal with shit at some point in the movie either.  Huxley’s all gung ho but that’s who she was from the beginning. She just now has someone who she can identify with.  And Benjamin Bratt decides to kick some ass when it’s kinda too late.  It’s not a real incredible movie but if you’re a Stallone and/or Snipes fan then it’s worth checking out at least once.