Demolition Man on DVD

Description

Searching for new directions, Sylvester Stallone starred in this farcical, 1993 SF piece about an ex-cop (Stallone) freed from 36 years of forced hibernation to help catch a criminal (Wesley Snipes) who released himself from a similar incarceration. The futuristic story finds Los Angeles a sea of Taco Bells and enforced peace and within that satiric overview Stallone's character becomes a gun-toting fish out of water. The film plays like a live-action cartoon and while there is nothing particularly wrong with that, Demolition Man is a rather flat experience. The irony of a peaceable society that both requires and despises its bloody saviours has been captured far more profoundly in movies like Dirty Harry. Sandra Bullock costars. LA cop John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone), nicknamed 'Demolition Man' due to his hands-on approach to law enforcement, is condemned to 70 years in the penal freezer after being set up by Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes), Public Enemy Number One. Halfway through his sentence, however, both he and Phoenix are catapulted out of captivity, discovering their city has been transformed into a peaceful utopia, under the benevolent rule of mayor Dr Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne). As a mysteriously pumped-up Phoenix carries on where he had left off 35 years earlier, Spartan teams up with a comparatively feisty cop (Sandra Bullock) to bring him to justice and expose the man who is engineering the whole scenario.