Sylvester Stallone is the good guy. He’s the cop who does what the other cops won’t. He wears a beret, so you know he’s tough. Wesley Snipes is the bad guy. He’s dressed in mismatched clothes and has dyed hair, so you know he’s ’90s bad. They clash, and nearly 30 civilians die as a result.
Buy Life Sucks paperbackBoth go to jail. But this is the then near future of 1996, so jail means cryo-freezing with behavior rehabilitation, so when they wake up 70 years in the future, they can rejoin society.
Flash to 2032, when everything is nice. It’s so nice if you swear you get fined. In the anodyne future, cop Sandra Bullock is reprimanded by her captain for wishing she had something to do. Everything is so nice, it’s boring. Until the ’90s good guy and bad guy become unfrozen, and turn the nice future into fun action chaos, with murder death kills.
Demolition Man is a fun action film. Demolition Man is an okay science fiction satire of political correctness and social norms of the mid-’90s. These two tones intersect decently, but never entirely mesh into a fully satisfactory story. It feels like the screenplay was either one rewrite from bringing everything together or had one too many writers knocking it off course from its potential.
Sly is a fish out of water in the future nice world, where’s he’s been thawed out to take care of the escaped Snipes. Snipes is so bad nobody knows what to do with him. When cops confront him, they ask their computers what to do. “Tell him to lie down and put his hands behind his back… or else.” It doesn’t work.
The story connects fun, if standard, action set pieces with the mild satire of the future nice world. And the film does commit to the bit. Everybody is always smiling, and saying pleasant things. After a couple of minutes, you want someone to come in and start punching them in their faces. Sandra Bullock is a standout because she secretly admires the older, rougher world, even if she’s still steeped in the current day pablum of niceness. She was nominated for a Razzie for worst supporting actress. I think that’s not fair; her affectless performance is intentional. In a world where all you feel is niceness, you’re not feeling anything. She has an undercurrent of discontent even as she mouths the same bland platitudes as her colleagues.
Of course, this is a science fiction world so there’s an ugly underbelly to all the supposed niceness. An underground of malcontents rebel against the nice world, though ineffectively. It’s one of the parts of the movie that doesn’t quite make sense. The mechanism by which these miscreants are thrown away isn’t clear. The dissidents are called “scraps”, but how do they get scrapped? The movie’s future world isn’t coherent enough to really explain how someone falls through the cracks to become some kind of chud.
What holds the film up are the performances, particularly the absolute tower of charisma that is Wesley Snipes. His Simon Phoenix is constantly entertaining, exuding complete confidence even when he says he has no idea what he’s doing. He was released from cryo with complete knowledge of the future world. How? Why? Even he doesn’t know, but it’s not going to keep him from meddling. He’s the puppet of powerful forces, but he knows they don’t know just how bad he actually is.
I believe this is the first 4K release for this film. The transfer looks fine to me, with the usual caveats that the higher resolution release makes the older compositing effects look less convincing than in more forgiving lower resolutions.
Demolition Man tries to walk a tight rope between brutal action and light comedic satire. It does okay. The brutally sanitized world of speech codes enforced by fines and absolute prohibitions on physical contact seem somewhat prescient considering some real-world current-day concerns. But it also feels like it’s mostly jokes, and not a totally coherent world. Still, the movie is a rousing entertainment with a little more on its mind than the average action film. Sly and Wesley Snipes are always a joy to watch on screen. It’s a great package for fans of the film. It’s a surprisingly entertaining film, with its uncomplicated story and intriguing (if, as I’ve said, undercooked) setting.
Demolition Man has been released on 4K UHD by Arrow Video. This release includes both the U.S. and International versions, though I believe the difference is just whether the characters reference Taco Bell or Pizza Hut as the only restaurant still around. There are three commentaries on disc: an archival one by director Marco Brambilla and producer Joel Silver, and two new ones for this release. One is by critic Mike White, and the other is by Marco Brambilla and screenwriter Daniel Waters.
Video extras (all, I believe, new to this release) include “Somewhere over the Rambo” (17 min), a visual essay by Josh Nelson; “Demolition Design” (14 min), an interview with production designer David L. Snyder; “Cryo Action” (6 min), an interview with stunt coordinator Charles Percini; “Biggs’ Body Shop” (6 min), an interview with special effects artist Chris Biggs; and “Tacos and Hockey Pucks” (10 min), an interview with Jeff Farley, a “body effects set coordinator.”
