Stallone and Snipes are thawed into a tidy, polite 2032 and the jokes about it are sharper than anyone had a right to expect. The action is not. Sandra Bullock, mangling the slang of a century she has only read about, walks off with the film.
Demolition Man has a better idea than it knows what to do with. Los Angeles, 1996: Sergeant John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone) brings a warehouse down on the killer Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes), and both men are frozen as punishment. In 2032 Phoenix is thawed and loose in San Angeles, a city so gentle that its police have forgotten how to arrest anyone, and the department defrosts Spartan because he is the last man who remembers how violence works. That setup hands the writers, Daniel Waters, Robert Reneau and Peter M. Lenkov, a whole film of jokes about a future that has outlawed rudeness, and it is the jokes we remember. The fights we had to look up.
David L. Snyder builds the city as a place where every edge has been sanded off. Walls are white or cream, cars are rounded and silent, and the police station looks like the lobby of a hotel that does not expect guests. Alex Thomson lights the 1996 prologue in firelight and orange smoke, with the sky above Los Angeles glowing like a furnace, and then lights 2032 in flat, even white that flatters nobody and is exactly right. Bob Ringwood puts the citizens in long tunics in colours chosen not to startle and puts Phoenix in bleached hair and clothes that look assembled from three other outfits, so that he reads as a stain on the picture from the moment he wakes up.
The comedy is where the film earns its keep. A machine on the wall fines Spartan a credit every time he swears, and he keeps swearing, and it keeps printing tickets. The lavatories contain three seashells and no paper, and the film never once explains what you are meant to do with them, which is the smartest decision anyone involved made. Taco Bell has won the franchise wars and is now the only restaurant. Huxley greets every crisis with a twentieth-century phrase she has got slightly wrong, and Bullock plays her with such bright, eager wrongness that we laughed out loud several times and were not ashamed of it. She is the one performer here who understands that the straight line in a comedy is a job and not a punishment.
Snipes does the other half of the work. His Phoenix bounces, grins, flips out of frame, and is plainly the only person in 2032 having a good time, and his pleasure is catching. Nigel Hawthorne plays Dr Raymond Cocteau, the man who designed this city, with the soft, patient voice of someone who has already won. Denis Leary turns up underground as Edgar Friendly, leader of the people who would not be tidied away, and delivers a single speech about wanting to eat red meat and run through the streets naked at the speed of a man who has been given one scene and intends to use it. Stallone is the straight man, which he can do, but the one-liners written for him land like dropped furniture.
The action is the problem, and it is a large one for an action film. Marco Brambilla stages the opening raid well, with a helicopter, a burning building and a sense of where everyone is. After that the set pieces settle into gunfights in white corridors, and Stuart Baird cuts them fast without ever telling us the geography, so bodies fall and we are not sure who shot them. Elliot Goldenthal’s score hits every punch with a wall of brass and drums, which would be fine if the punches were worth it. The finale is a long fight in a dark place we will not describe, beyond saying that we checked our watch twice and were irritated with a film that had been so good company an hour earlier.
RoboCop (1987) had much the same idea, a slick corporate future and a cop who does not fit it, and it followed the idea all the way to its conclusions. Demolition Man takes the easy joke every time it is offered one. A society that fines swearing is a soft target, and the film knows it, which is why it also gives us Cocteau as a tyrant and Friendly’s sewer as a filthy, free alternative and then chooses the sewer because the sewer has bacon. It is not an argument so much as a menu.
See it with someone who laughs easily and does not mind waiting through the shooting. It runs 115 minutes, carries a 15 certificate, and is at its best when nobody on screen is holding a gun.
