But What About the Three Seashells?

We just reviewed Independence Day, and I noted how it’s a big, dumb, stupid film that somehow actually works. Well now we have another one here, with Demolition Man, a big, dumb, stupid movie from 1993 starring Sylvester Stallone, and it also somehow works. Sure, it wasn’t as successful as a film as the giant disaster movie that would come three years later, making only $159 Mil against a budget tracked at upwards of $77 Mil (which, if that’s actually true, would make this actually kind of a flop), but it does have its charms. And, by looking at these two films back to back we can see the evolution of the action genre and begin to understand how things shifted away from the likes of Arnold and Sly towards different action fare.

Bear in mind that for a while Sylvester Stallone was one of the biggest action stars of all time. He had a hugely successful string of hits, and he managed to launch two massive, blockbuster franchises with both Rocky and RamboThis film and media series, based on a book by David Morrell, follows the adventures of a Vietnam veteran just trying to make his way in a world that no longer wants him.. There was a time where just having Stallone in a film (much like having the Governator in the film) was worth an easy $200 Mil at the Box Office. As a Hollywood executive you spent money getting these guys in your films so that you could boost the Box Office and get people coming back for all the crazy action.

But then times changed. The actors were still doing their thing, giving muscle-bound performances packed with one-liners, but audiences weren’t as interested anymore. They wanted more – more characters, more charisma, more one-liners, and way more action – and about the only thing they didn’t want more of was muscles. You could trace this trend back to Die Hard, really, where Bruce Willis’s John McClane gets stuck in an overblow and bombasting action film, but Willis was about as far from a muscle-bound superhero as he could be. It opened audiences’ eyes to new ideas, and over the following years the films that had been Arnold and Sly’s bread and butter started performing worse and worse.

That leads into Demolition Man, a film that would have been a sure-fire hit a few years earlier sold entirely on Sylvester Stallone’s star power, and yet it could only barely break even at the Box Office. And then a few years later we have another massive action film, Independence Day, and there’s nary a muscle-bound star in the film at all. Willis’s McClane found a like-minded successor in Will Smith’s fast talking action heroes, and the kinds of movies Sly and Arnold were used to make dried up.

Demolition Man, then, reads more like a last gasp of a dying genre, the kinds of action films that used to get made before the whole of Hollywood changed around them. It has the action, the bombast, the one-liners, but Sylvester Stallone wasn’t the draw he could have been. Hell, I’d bet if you slapped Will Smith into the lead role at the time the film would have easily made $200 Mil more just from the star power. It was a seismic shift and Demolition Man, which is actually a pretty fun, if stupid, movie, was caught in the crossfire. Which is a pity as I really do like this big, dumb film.

Stallone stars as John Spartan, a hero cop working on the wasteland that is Los Angeles. Called into a hostage situation led by the evil Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes), John needs to try and save as many hostages as he can… except Simon has already killed them all. A tense battle between the two occurs, and Spartan comes out on top, arresting Phoenix. But in the aftermath John is blamed for all the dead hostages, with many saying it was his fault they were dead (even though it clearly wasn’t), and John is sent away to prison: a long stay in cryo-freeze until he’s paid his debt to society.

Bouncing ahead to 2032, Phoenix is brought out of cold storage for his parole hearing. Somehow he goes crazy, destroying the equipment holding him and killing the people around him before escaping into the seeming Utopia of the now renamed San Angeles metroplex. The city is ill-equipped to handle such a nefarious villain, so the decision is made to bring John Spartan out of cold storage so he can pursue Phoenix. Paired up with modern cop Lenina Huxley (Sandra Bullock), Spartan has to learn the ropes of this brave new future while chasing down his great nemesis… and just maybe clear his name in the process as well.

The plot of Demolition Man is pretty damn basic. A bad guy escapes prison, and the good guy has to chase him down, as the two circle each other for a little while, during which they engage in bombastic action set-pieces. It’s the same plot we’d already seen plenty of times before in other action films throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. It’s just that this time the film was dressed up with faux-futuristic design and a lot of silly little flourishes. The plot really wasn’t what you came for with Demolition Man, but the humor about the future the film was making.

There are a ton of little flourishes in the film that showed that the creators – director Marco Brambilla and writers Daniel Waters, Robert Reneau, and Peter M. Lenkov – knew they were making a pretty silly movie and they were happy about it. There’s the famous joke about the three seashells, a device in a bathroom that makes no sense to John Spartan. There’s the radio station that plays only commercial jingles (which, as a viewer back in the day, shoved the Armor Hot Dogs jingle into my brain where it’s lived ever since). There’s the “Great Restaurant Wars” joke that states Taco Bell is every restaurant in the future. The film is dumb, but it knows it.

That’s honestly it’s great charm. While the lead duo of Stallone and Bullock are solid enough together, they aren’t really given a ton to do beyond crack wise and let the plot play out. But the jokes the film makes, having a laugh at all of its setup and how silly this whole future is, that’s what makes the film. Without this silly future this would be a bland and boring cop-v-villain plotline and no one would remember it. Demolition Man works because it plays to its strengths, the silliness of the 1980s-style action genre, and then doubles down again and again.

But I think that’s also why the film (nearly) bombed in theaters as well. Stallone talks about how he regrets this film never getting a sequel, but in all honesty Demolition Man wasn’t nearly as well liked when it arrived in theaters as Stallone seems to think. It came and went pretty quickly, and only really gained its following on cable and home video, once people could kick back and enjoy the film on their own terms. It’s not a strong showing for Stallone as an actor or an action star, and while Bullock has fun as his reliable sidekick, this was just another stepping stone for her before she became a huge star in her own right. This film didn’t really do anyone any favors back in the day, all because audiences saw it for what it was: an overblown B-film with 1980s action movie aspirations. Ten years earlier it would have worked. But in 1993 it was much harder to get audiences to care about a film like this.

Demolition Man lives and dies by its excesses, and while it’s hard to hate the film now, no one really cared about it back in the day. It wasn’t good enough to win the Box Office, and very quickly it was drowned out by better action and sci-fi films that did its quips, silliness, and bombast better. In just three short years we went from Stallone trying to sell the near future on the back of his 1980s star power, and failing, to Will Smith dominating another Summer on that back of his star power instead. Audiences were interested in something new, and Stallone simply didn’t have it anymore.

But that doesn’t make Demolition Man a bad watch now. It’s the perfect kind of streaming service filler that makes you smile while you watch it. It’s big, it’s dumb, and it doesn’t really care, and there’s a certain kind of charm to that. Demolition Man was never going to be a winner back in 1993, but it can entertain now as audiences find it (and find it again) any time they’re looking for something silly. And that’s really the best it ever should have hoped for.