Demolition Man

This movie was scarily accurate at seeing how our future would turn out.

Though I’m still waiting for every home to have three seashells in the bathroom. Maybe one day.

Demolition Man is undoubtedly one of the greatest action movies ever made. Everything about it just works. It takes two men overflowing with testosterone, drops them into a future neither of them really understands, and then lets them cause absolute chaos.

Sylvester Stallone is perfect as John Spartan. He is basically a relic from a much more violent time, suddenly waking up in a society where swearing gets you fined, physical violence is almost unheard of and even eating a burger seems to be frowned upon. Watching him try to understand this strange new world gives the film some of its funniest moments.

Then you have Wesley Snipes as Simon Phoenix, who is easily one of the most entertaining action villains of the 90s.

Phoenix is completely unhinged. He is colourful, loud, unpredictable and clearly having the time of his life causing as much destruction as possible. Snipes gives him so much personality that even when he is murdering people and blowing things up, you cannot take your eyes off him.

The contrast between Spartan and Phoenix works brilliantly too. They both come from the same violent world, but while Spartan is trying to figure out how to survive in the future, Phoenix immediately realises that nobody around him has any idea how to deal with someone like him.

That is where a lot of the humour comes from.

The future itself is ridiculous in the best possible way. Everything has been made clean, safe and polite to the point where nobody really seems to know how to handle anything dangerous anymore. Restaurants, language, sex, music and even going to the toilet have all apparently been redesigned by people determined to remove every bit of fun from life.

And somehow, plenty of those ideas feel even funnier now than they probably did when the film came out.

Sandra Bullock is great as Lenina Huxley as well. Her obsession with the past and complete misunderstanding of old slang works perfectly alongside Spartan, and she gives the film even more personality without ever getting in the way of the action.

And there is plenty of action.

Gunfights, explosions, car chases and two huge blokes smashing each other through anything they can find. Demolition Man knows exactly what kind of film it is and never tries to pretend otherwise.

It is silly, clever, violent, colourful and genuinely funny, with just enough satire underneath everything to make its bizarre future world even more entertaining.

And until someone finally explains exactly how those three seashells work, I am just going to assume humanity has failed to reach the future Demolition Man promised us.