Demolition Man
|Los Angeles is on fire, the Hollywood Hills burning and the iconic sign aflame, while downtown LAPD Sergeant John Spartan is seeking to tame another conflagration before it gets out of hand, the psychopathic bomber Simon Phoenix having taken a busload of hostages, held in a derelict warehouse rigged with charges; Spartan managing to extricate and arrest Phoenix, the charges go off and the building collapses, killing the thirty innocents left inside.
Blamed for the mass deaths, both Spartan and Phoenix are sentenced to be cryogenically frozen with periodic reviews of their suitability for release; in the year 2032 Phoenix is revived for a parole hearing but takes the opportunity to escape, and with the apparent utopia of San Angeles having moved away from violence and the requirement of an armed police force, serving as little more than glorified parking wardens, they are poorly placed to handle a dangerous criminal and the decision is made to also thaw Spartan, understandably known as “the Demolition Man.”
Released in late 1993 with the opening scenes taking place in the all-too-close future of 1996, the spectacular fiery destruction of the derelict building which caps the opening an actual scheduled demolition of a disused Department of Water and Power facility with added pyrotechnics, Demolition Man was the directorial debut of Marco Brambilla, positioned as a vehicle for action hero Sylvester Stallone and fast rising star Wesley Snipes, with relative newcomer Sandra Bullock appearing as future cop Lenina Huxley.
Spartan’s liaison in the brave new world in which he awakes, Demolition Man is not only the bad cop / worse criminal action adventure with suitable amounts of devastation that the title implies, it is also a “fish out of water” comedy as Spartan adjusts to the enormous changes of the world he has been woken in, an era of clean skies and clean language thanks to the “verbal morality statute,” and Huxley learns about the attitudes of the nineties, professional and personal.
While it is perhaps unbelievable that violence would vanish in a generation, the aftermath of Phoenix rising from the ice leading to the first murder recorded since 2010, Demolition Man is more of a “what if?” positioned to entertain rather than a film to be taken seriously, but that is not to say that it is without significance, the script by Heathers’ Daniel Waters, Robert Reneau and Peter M Lenkov inevitably influenced by the rioting prompted by heavy-handed policing which exacerbated existing racial tensions which devastated sections of Los Angeles in 1992.
The film on the surface a similarly heavy-handed officer of the law pursuing a black criminal, both are in fact being played, Spartan’s conviction for involuntary manslaughter the result of a negligent investigation which would have shown the hostages were already dead long before the building fell on them, and Phoenix’s escape having been arranged by Doctor Raymond Cocteau, an oddly cast Nigel Hawthorne a world away from the corridors of power of Yes, Prime Minister but still devious and manipulative as he masterminds chaos as a means to generate profit.
With a supporting cast which includes Beetlejuice’s Glenn Shadix and The Brother from Another Planet’s Bill Cobbs, the vastly more multicultural underground revolution is led by Denis Leary, both he and Wesley Snipes more comfortable with the fast dialogue and quips of the script than Stallone who despite his other attributes is not a natural comedian by any measure, instead leading the charge around the magnificent locations, many recently built at the time of the shoot such as the Los Angeles Convention Centre and the then-headquarters of the GTE Corporation, as well as expansive custom sets which are of course suitably demolished.
Restored in 4K from the original 35mm film elements for Arrow, their new edition contains both the marginally different US and international versions, known as “Taco Bell” and “Pizza Hut,” three commentary tracks including Brambilla, Waters and producer Joel Silver among others, and interviews with production designer David Snyder, stunt coordinator Charles Percini, special make-up artists Charles Biggs and Jeff Farley and a visual essay on how Stallone’s career led him to become the Demolition Man.
Demolition Man is available on 4K and Blu-ray from Arrow Films