Demolition Man opened in the United States on October 8, 1993, with Sylvester Stallone as a police officer who leaves wreckage behind him and Wesley Snipes as the killer he cannot keep frozen. The film earned $159 million worldwide and was considered a successful film for Stallone. It is also a loud, weightless mess that mistakes noise for satire, and it earns a 3.4 out of 10 on Metacritic, which scores it 34 out of 100.
Trailer, via Warner On Demand.
John Spartan and the Cryo-Penitentiary
The setup is lean enough. In 1996 Los Angeles, psychopathic criminal Simon Phoenix kidnaps a busload of passengers. Officer John Spartan, nicknamed “The Demolition Man” for the collateral damage he causes while apprehending suspects, mounts an unauthorized assault to capture him. A thermal scan of the area reveals no trace of the hostages. Spartan raids the building anyway, Phoenix sets off explosives, and the hostages’ corpses are found in the rubble. Phoenix claims Spartan knew about them and attacked regardless.
Both men are sentenced to lengthy prison terms in the California Cryo-Penitentiary, where convicts are frozen and undergo subliminal rehabilitation. That is the film’s best idea, and it is spent in minutes.
San Angeles in 2032
Phoenix is thawed for a parole hearing in 2032 and escapes using skills he did not have before. He can hack into the city’s computer networks and easily overpowers the officers who try to stop him, to the disbelief of colleagues watching remotely from headquarters.
The city is San Angeles, a megalopolis formed from the merger of Los Angeles, San Diego and Santa Barbara after a massive earthquake, designed and run by Dr. Raymond Cocteau. Lieutenant Lenina Huxley, an officer fascinated by 20th-century culture, learns about Spartan’s career from veteran officer Zachary Lamb, who suggests Spartan is their best chance because he can anticipate Phoenix’s actions. Huxley persuades her superior to parole and reinstate him. Spartan finds San Angeles sterile and oppressive, with all behavior deemed immoral or unhealthy declared illegal.
Stallone, Snipes and the Casting Churn
Stallone passed on the project at first, then came back to it, liking the idea of two equal opponents. He wanted Jackie Chan for Phoenix; Chan turned it down, not wanting to play a villain. Snipes turned down the role several times, so Joel Silver and director Marco Brambilla went to the set of Rising Sun to convince him in person.
“He works without rehearsing too much, and he improvises a lot. The two of them, that combination of energies and the way they interact, really did the movie a lot of favors.”
That is Brambilla on Snipes, and the pairing is the one thing here that works. The rest of the production was less steady. Lori Petty was cast as Huxley and fired after two days of filming over what Silver called “creative differences”; Petty blamed personality differences, saying, “Sly and I were like oil and water.” Sandra Bullock got the part after impressing Silver with her audition tape. Denis Leary wrote his own comedy rants and sat through a long studio approval process. Nigel Hawthorne took Cocteau to raise his profile, having been known mainly as a television and stage actor.
What the Film Wants to Be
Brambilla, in his directorial debut, reaches for Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World and H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes. The references land as decoration. San Angeles never feels like a system anyone lives inside; it feels like a set with rules announced at us.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1996 | Spartan and Phoenix sentenced to cryogenic prison |
| 2032 | Phoenix thawed, escapes, Spartan reinstated |
| October 8, 1993 | U.S. release |
The action is loud and weightless. Snipes gets the only real charge out of the material, playing Phoenix as a man delighted by his own upgrade. Stallone plays the straight man to a joke the film cannot tell.
Why It Still Does Not Hold Up
Demolition Man has a premise worth a smarter movie and a cast that occasionally finds one. What it does not have is a point of view about the future it builds. The 2032 gags about banned behavior and sterile living are stated, not dramatized, and the film keeps cutting away to fights before any of it can bite.
The $159 million gross says audiences showed up. It does not say they got anything for it. The film drew mixed reviews on release, and the case has not improved with age. The Stallone-Snipes matchup is the whole asset, and a movie built on one asset is a trailer with a runtime.
3.4 of 10.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
