One of the funniest visions of the future ever in this under-rated movie.
It was a good movie when it came out but it's only gotten better over the years... Why? Because it's like a Nostradamus documentary!
Video calls, teleconferencing, self-driving cars, Arnie the politician, tablets, Alexa-style assistants, YouTube-like instruction videos... Not to mention the push toward veganism, pacifism, self-help, mindfulness... The danger of viruses and body fluids... And the most frightening, the reduction of music to emotionless shortened pop song jingos...!
It is quite staggering. And it doesn't paint a great picture for all its 'utopia' portrayal.
As an action film, it's very good because of Snipes' martial arts and Stallone's comedy, as well as his excellent pairing with Sandra Bullock.
Gets better with age and I hope they attempt a sequel.
Two thoughts stay with you - how do the seashells work... And which version did you get, the badly-overdubbed Pizza Hut or the real Taco Bell?
8/10
Plot twist: she is actually his daughter HAHAHAHAHA
A super cheesy 90s action flick. I love how seeing old movie portray the future. Seeing Sylvester Stallone being a fish out of water while kicking ass is great. I kinda want some taco bell now.
Demolition Man is my favorite movie about a nightmarish future, where they have gotten rid of free thought and everything the ruling elite considers immoral, and…wait… Isn't that what both the numbnuts on the left AND the idiots on the right want for all of us???
Anyway… Demolition Man.
A rather fun and entertaining piece of early 90s action that is almost a parody of the genre, but skirts the line beautifully. Stallone looks good, Bullock looks perfect and would charm the habit off a nun, and Snipes is batshit insane. We even get a Denis Leary rant at one point. Mix all of the above with big explosions, gunfights, and some rather and cheesy comedy, you get the perfect combo for an evening's entertainment.
One of my all time favourite films, but for the first time ever I've just seen the Pizza Hut version. So weird.
I used to see this movie as a funny parody. Now I found it premonitory.
Ah, the early '90s big budget escapist films. Tim Burton's Batman films, Terminator 2, Bill & Ted, Army of Darkness... Demolition Man.
Realistically, a 6/10 as far as visions of the future go, but bumped to 8/10 for just how well all its parts come together, and how well it has aged despite the simplicity of the script.
On my most recent re-watch of this (one of the few films I've found myself re-watching over the years) I was awed at just how gorgeous the lighting and cinematography are in this, especially in the sci-fi interior shots. The casting, the acting, the punchy, quotable dialog just make this an immensely enjoyable film on every watch, and with the action and budget involved, though you could ask for a more complex treatment of the subject matter, it would likely have never made it through the first draft, and they even acknowledge this in the end of the film by ending on a "you'll figure out a good balance" line. It's self-aware, and knows what it can get away with within the confines of a 2-hour film.
This decade was about the last time Hollywood took on a serious subject in a sci-fi treatment and was able to tell an honest story while actually having fun with it instead of taking itself too seriously. An American Sc-Fi/Action gem from the last decade that got the comic book movie right. Since then the grasp of tone and any semblance of relevance has gone out the window, along with the writers, in lieu of pseudo-intellectual, grim-dark seriousness and MCU humor, and this film functions as a metaphor for the kind of shakeup Hollywood needs right now.
ps
It's an updated Hollywood action movie version of Brave New World (_Lenina Huxley_) for those who might think the premise is too Over The Top.
Lenina Huxley? ;)
Lenin (a) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin
Huxley - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley
They really don't make them like this anymore. Absurd, funny, dripping with 80's glass-smashing aesthetic and bombastic action, the creativity of this version of 2032 is really something to behold, and not too far off where we're probably going to end up with how things are at the moment. One liners galore and action sequences so extended and loud you'll probably have some form of tinnitus by the time the credits role. There is a lot of social commentary here too which isn't lost on me, and I feel it might be more relevant today than they initially intended.
Wesley Snipes gives a Nic Cage-tier performance, he's absolutely swinging for the fences for the entirety of this movie and it's great to see.
And finally, now I know the origins of the three shells meme! I always wondered where it came from and when it popped up here it was like a connection had been made in my brain.
Just great, almost-mindless fun. Definitely one I'll keep around for future viewings.
I literally can't say how many times I have watched this movie. LITERALLY. Everytime is just as fun as the last... Actually... no, no, it's even better. My family and I can quote almost the entire movie lol
Someone put me back in the fridge.
Demolition man: I still like it as an action film, that society of the future based on good luck, bad business
"187 What is that? Death murder, which one? Death murder. There hasn't been a murder in 17 years."
How was this not made in the 80's? Not a good movie, but I've watched it more than I care to admit. It's one of those flicks you catch when you're clicking through the channels in the motel waiting for the connect to show up with more crack.
“Send a maniac to catch a maniac” good old classic action film done right that never gets old and only gets better and definitely one of (Wesley Snipes) tops along with his blade and it’s a shame he’s just not got it anymore.
This movie is a 10 just for the replayability... and the 3 sea shells are for washing, rinsing, and drying duhhhhh lol
Film 45 (Goal: 300) of 2024
Not sure where I really stand on Demolition Man. I knew it was going to be an average action flick going in, with it's big selling point being it's two leading men. But the script is all over the place without much vision. There's a 1984-ish narrative of controlled society but it just feels lost in this film. The film tries to tie it into a larger story, but the narrative feels out of place between what should be a simple cop who bends the rules vs. criminal who stops at nothing story. Snipes and Stallone seem like they're having fun, with Snipes in particular chews a lot of scenery - not always well but the character definitely stands out. Denis Leary just feels lost in this film.
Bit of a strange internal universe in this one - Rambo exists and Schwarzenegger was also an action star, who went on to become President (a little bit of foreshadowing for his future political career).
Don't know if I'll ever watch this one again. Think it joins a very long one and done pile.
Absolutely terrible. 10/10
Denis Leary was a weird choice.
I just finished watching a 10bit colour remastered version and enjoyed it very much. I think keeping the story simple and spending all that budget on futuristic sets and that cast was a great idea. The movie has aged very well thanks to those choices.
"We're police officers! We're not trained to handle this kind of violence!"
They kind of got the future right in Demolition Man didn't they? Getting rid of all the bad stuff in the world. Like yesterday I read that in England some folks are saying that eating cake is as bad as smoking? Damn the world is changing. So happy we don't have the three seashells yet here. I don't know how to clean myself after a visit to the toilet with them.
Anyway Wesley Snipes is soo much fun in this, Sandra Bullock is turning up to the charm to eleven and Sly is always fun.
Demolition Man is campy silly 90s fun with great sets, a great running gag, a epic underground world and a amazing kill of the main bad guy in Snipes. I really miss these kind of movies today. Sometimes all you need to add to some decent ideas is a little cheese and the entertainment value will sky rocket and you have yourself one for the ages.
Great way to start the weekend!
Just watched this for the very first time, and I was prepared to give it a scathing review until I realized it's deliberately campy, cheesy, silly...all while wrapped in the slick coating of a violent action flick starring Sylvester Stallone (at the height of his tough-guy persona) and Wesley Snipes. With art like the one used in the promotional poster, who would have guessed this would also be viewed as a comedy? After realizing that comedy was part of the movie, it became much more "fun" to watch. Cheesy, over-the-top, at times absolutely silly...but still fun. If you've never seen this, you have to go into it realizing that it's MEANT to be campy and silly. Yes, it's an "action" film - of sorts - but (1) it's intended to be more fun/sci-fi/campy than "tough guy kicks @$$" movie and (2) this is a 30-year old movie so undoubtedly some of the effects and cinematography are going to be really outdated. It was still a fun watch, however. If you're looking to kill a couple hours on a slow evening, this would probably entertain you.
NOTE Public service announcement: Somewhere around the 1:10:00 mark (the "sex" scene between Stallone and Bullock) there are several seconds...maybe a full minute?... of bright flashing light sequences. As stated before, although I don't suffer from epilepsy or other such disorders, these flashing light sequences were quite disruptive and painful for me to sit through (I actually wound up shielding my eyes). Just be aware going in that it could cause some problems for anyone suffering from disorders triggered by flashing/strobe/pulsing lights or movie scenes.
Despite memeable dialogue throughout, the script as a whole doesn't do much for me—in large part, because the timeframe is too short.
Perhaps I shouldn't have revisited this one. I'm not convinced that I'd seen the whole thing before, now, but the likely truth is that I did see all of it and just forgot everything but the memes because the story is… well, forgettable.
Some mfs are always trying to ice-skate uphill! Wesley Snipes made this for me.
A teeming vat of loose, outrageous, future-gazing action concepts with one of the worst scripts I think I've ever seen. It's like somebody accidentally green-lit a Michael Scarn movie. We meet our hero, imaginatively named John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone), on the verge of bungee jumping into a gang-occupied industrial warehouse in south central LA, where a busload of hostages are held for ransom by a manic psychopath type (Wesley Snipes). Things don't go well, and at the end of the day both hunter and hunted are cryogenically frozen for nearly forty years.
They wake into a utopian society, the sprawling megalopolis of San Angeles, which purports to cover most of the American west coast, though we only glimpse a few uninspired city blocks. There, before the chase is resumed, we catch wacky misunderstandings between the sheltered natives and the rugged, newly-defrosted cavemen of the previous generation. Loads of half-baked gunfights and unconvincing fisticuffs ensue, plus a museum shootout and a highway chase aboard a self-driving car.
Stallone grunts and flexes, showing an awkward amount of skin. Snipes is deeply obnoxious, overplaying his villainous turn at every opportunity. Sandra Bullock is SUPER green, hopelessly lost in one of her first major roles. The core of the film is a total brainless strikeout, but one thing Demolition Man does have going for it is a sense of humor. Like Idiocracy many years later, it shows almost no faith in the greater human race, boiling many of our society's most complicated issues down to the single most moronic possible outcome for comedic profit. Life in 2032 California seems calm, but also relentlessly vanilla, with all the spices and colors stamped out by years of risk-averse lawmaking. Every restaurant in the nation is now a Taco Bell, and the people are content with that. Many such predictions have fared surprisingly well, with the recent ubiquity of Zoom video conferencing and the impending arrival of automated personal vehicles. It even predicted the brief political rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger! No cryogenic prisons or seashells in the bathroom yet, sadly.
Demolition Man is almost constantly entertaining, but often for precisely the wrong reasons, given its razzie-level writing and acting. I enjoy bad movies from time to time, as we all do, but at the end of the day, they're still bad movies.
Shout by KBlockedParent2013-09-21T08:13:07Z
A guilty pleasure. I love Bullock in this naive role. Her fiery and curious nature is reminiscent of a teenager's need to rebel and explore.
Sly is adorably awkward and Snipes pulls off overalls like no other. 90's cheesy action films have a cult following and I am proud to be a member.