Demolition Man (1993)

Producer Joel Silver's commitment to really big explosions and wisecracking action heroes suggests he may well remain King of the No Brain Movie until the 21st Century, but while he never threatens to pack any heavy intellectual firepower a thread of wry, sly, self-parodic cleverness has always run through his work. Demolition Man, which blows up enough things to keep Saturday Night yob renters off the fast-forward button, elaborates on the knowingness of Die Hard and Roadhouse, and manages to get away with the jokiness that doomed Silver's Hudson Hawk and the non-Silver Last Action Hero to megaturkey status. For the first time in years, Sylvester Stallone edges past Arnie in the hipness stakes, pulling off a joke about President Schwarzenegger better than LAH did the gag about Stallone's T2.

The third-hand plot has deep-frozen 1990s steroid supercop John Spartan (Stallone) defrosted in an idyllic but oppressive future, to track down his old enemy, psychopath Simon Phoenix (Snipes). Spartan must save the Californian city of San Angeles from old-style terrorism by applying equally old-fashioned heroic ultra-violence. The plot is a variation on a theme that goes back as far as Buck Rogers in the 25th century (last seen in a direct-to-video quickie called Project: Shadowchaser, which had suspicious similarities with the current epic), but is merely an excuse to pit Sly (who does a better job of being funny here than he did in his more conventional comedies, and still gets to bungy-jump with a machine-gun into a blazing riot) against a lightly-caricatured pastel future.

Hardly a serious attempt at social prophecy, this is full of genuinely clever jokes about action movies and California triviality: the Golden Oldies station that replays 1990s ad jingles, irritatingly omnipresent swear boxes that chide the 20th Century barbarians for their non-PC/non-PG language, sidekick cop Sandra Bullock's gung ho idolising of Spartan's destructive past, the brainwashing rehabilitation process that unlooses Spartan from cryo-sleep as an expert knitter, Dennis Leary's role as the leader of the meat-eating and chain-smoking rebels.

If action scenes aren't quite as well handled by debuting pop video man Brambilla as they would be if James Cameron or even John McTiernan were holding the megaphone, this still delivers the carnage and property damage you could hope for. But it's the skewed, sick comedy worldview - courtesy of Heathers-Hudson Hawk scripter Daniel Waters? - that makes it worth renting again.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Empire

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