Demolition Man (1993)
★★★★ — Demolition Man (1993)
The three seashells. If you know, you know. And if you don't, well, that's the whole point, and it's one of the funniest running gags in 90s action cinema. Demolition Man is the kind of film that shouldn't work as well as it does, and yet here we are, thirty-odd years on, and I'm still giving it four stars and meaning every single one of them.
Yes, the premise is completely daft. A loose-cannon cop and a vicious criminal both get cryogenically frozen in the mid-90s, then thawed out in 2032 to find that society has been scrubbed clean of anything remotely edgy, dangerous or fun. No swearing, no meat, no contact sports, no physical intimacy. Every restaurant is a Taco Bell. It is, on paper, absolutely ridiculous. But here's the thing: the film knows it's ridiculous, and it plays that knowledge beautifully. There's a real wit running through the whole thing, a satirical streak that pokes at political correctness, corporate homogeneity and the sanitisation of culture with a knowing wink. It's sharper than it has any right to be.
Sylvester Stallone is doing exactly what Stallone does best here, and I mean that as a genuine compliment. He's been brilliant at playing the out-of-time bruiser, the man whose blunt-force approach to life keeps clashing with whatever world he's been dropped into. I've loved watching that quality in him going all the way back to First Blood, and in Demolition Man the fish-out-of-water angle gives him real comic material to work with alongside the action. He's funny here, properly funny, and he seems to be enjoying himself enormously.
But honestly, the film belongs to Wesley Snipes. His villain is a complete maniac, all wild energy and unpredictability, and Snipes throws himself into it with such obvious relish that you can't take your eyes off him. The two of them spark off each other brilliantly. The chemistry between a Stallone hero and a truly unhinged antagonist is a specific kind of magic, and this film has it in spades.
The action sequences are loud, dumb and deeply satisfying. Nobody is pretending otherwise. Cars explode, buildings get wrecked, and physics takes a well-deserved holiday. But the real pleasure is in the world-building that surrounds all the carnage. The little details of this scrubbed-clean future society are genuinely inventive, and the film keeps finding new ways to wring comedy out of them. The idea that Taco Bell won the "franchise wars" and is now the only restaurant in existence landed differently in different territories depending on which edit you watched, which is a whole separate piece of trivia I find oddly charming.
There's a version of this review where I feel obliged to hedge, to call it a guilty pleasure, to apologise for rating it so highly. I'm not going to do that. A guilty pleasure implies you shouldn't enjoy something, and I think Demolition Man absolutely earns its enjoyment. It's a film that commits fully to its own absurdity, uses that absurdity to say something genuinely interesting about conformity and freedom, and wraps the whole thing in relentless entertainment. That's not a guilty pleasure. That's just a good film doing its job.
It sits alongside the best of early 90s blockbuster excess, the era when action films were allowed to be both enormous and a little bit strange. The social commentary never gets preachy because the film is always too busy having fun, and the fun never feels hollow because there's always a sharper idea lurking underneath. That balance is harder to pull off than it looks.
Four stars. A true 90s classic, and I'll not hear a word against it.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 1993 | Watched: 2025-04-10
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Sky Go · Now TV Cinema
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Howdy Amazon Channel
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More with Sylvester Stallone: Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) · First Blood (1982) · Cop Land (1997) · Rocky (1976)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
