Trailer Park: Demolition Man

Movie
Demolition Man, released October 8 1993

Trailer Synopsis
In the year 2013, psychopathic killer Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes) breaks out of his cryogenic prison to wreak havoc on a society that is no longer equipped to handle good old fashioned American street violence. The only way to combat this new threat is to unthaw the cop who originally put Phoenix away: John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone). Lots of fighting and shooting and explosions happen, and Sandra Bullock is also there for the ride.

Does It Honestly Represent the Movie?
You bet! Demolition Man is a super-fun, delightfully obscene, ultra-violent ride that represents the tail end of Stallone’s peak as a big time movie star. He stars as Spartan, a cop on the edge known as the Demolition Man. He’s one of those movie cops who seemingly only hunts one career criminal: Simon Phoenix, a straight up domestic terrorist given insane Joker energy by Wesley Snipes. Spartan finally nails him in the opening moments of the movie, but he is wrongfully convicted of killing a bunch of civilians during the bust, so both he and Phoenix are sentenced to do time in a new cryogenic prison in which they are frozen in giant ice cubes and reprogrammed to become more productive members of society. Thirty-six years later, a nefarious conspiracy leads to Phoenix being let out of his icy prison, and he begins to wreak havoc on the city of San Angeles (a sprawling metroplex formed after a catastrophic earthquake). Their society is now violence-free, so the neutered San Angeles Police Department (they don’t even carry guns!) doesn’t know how to deal with a criminal like Phoenix. In response, they thaw out Spartan specifically so he can catch his arch nemesis one more time. A large chunk of the run time is given over to Spartan as a fish out of water who can’t get used to new futuristic customs, so fellow police officer Lenina Huxley (Bullock) acts as Spartan’s ambassador into the brave new world.

Does It Make You Want To See the Movie?
It does! This is one of the first trailers I’ve covered in this series that is really built around big honkin’ movie stars. Stallone had hit a bit of a career skid at the time: In the previous few years, he was coming off of the ill-advised and poorly received Rocky V, plus the genuine bombs Oscar and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. But Cliffhanger arrived earlier in ‘93, and that was a big hit that he’s great in. He still had a lot of juice as a movie star despite the recent gullies. Meanwhile, Snipes was white hot. The dude’s walk-up to Demolition Man included New Jack City, Jungle Fever, White Men Can’t Jump, Passenger 57 and Rising Sun, all of which were big hits and many of which featured head-turning performances from Snipes (he’s Oscar-worthy in both Jungle Fever and White Men Can’t Jump, two very different characters). The Demolition Man trailer wants you to know that two hugely charismatic action stars are going to duke it out over the course of two hours, and it presents the whole endeavor as an intensely adrenalized series of action set pieces. For anybody looking to carry over the energy from Cliffhanger or Passenger 57, this was the perfect solution.

What’s Weird About It?
I thought it was strange that the trailer barely acknowledges the presence of Bullock, but she was still a few years away from her big series of breakouts (we were still a year away from Speed and two years from her While You Were Sleeping/The Net double-shot in ‘95). This is very much her most high-profile role at the beginning of her career and she handles it with aplomb even though her character is largely there to explain future stuff to Stallone (like why all restaurants are now Taco Bell).

Also, the narration is very non-traditional. It tries to take the same soft-spoken tone that permeates the 2032 portion of the movie, which makes sense in context but feels strange juxtaposed with all the punching and shooting and exploding. It makes some attempt to parse the admittedly convoluted plot, but it smartly leaves behind most of the unnecessary details in favor of the stunts and effects.

I was also surprised that it doesn’t really zero in on the quip-heavy exchanges between Phoenix and Spartan, and it particularly underplays Snipes’ performance, which is absolutely bonkers and filled with scenery-chewing glee. It’s legit one of Snipes’ best turns, but the trailer doesn’t really focus on that in the way that, say, the Batman Forever trailer zoomed in on Jim Carrey’s Riddler.

Does It Spoil the Movie?
Only in the sense that it has to in order to present the premise. Demolition Man is one of those movies that takes a while to arrive at its primary plot and spends a lot of time explaining the reality of the situation that lands both Spartan and Phoenix in the future. None of that stuff is boring, per se, but everybody who saw the trailer to Demolition Man knew that the action had to take place in the future, so the long walk to get to 2032 could feel superfluous. I don’t consider that a spoiler, but it does give away enough of the latter part of the film to make the first 20 minutes seem mildly irrelevant.

Final Analysis
The Demolition Man trailer presents the movie as a very prototypical whizz-bang action flick that both Stallone and Snipes fans were familiar with by late ‘93. But the movie is way, way weirder than the trailer suggests. The original script was written by Peter Lenkov (who is now a TV guy who showruns stuff like Hawaii Five-0 and MacGuyver) and then punched up by Daniel Waters (Heathers), and it really combines the prototypical supercop action stuff with Waters’ more acerbic sense of humor. Demoltion Man is genuinely funny, and its vision of the future is interesting and loopy and thought-provoking. There’s a lot more going on with it than in, say, Passenger 57 (a movie I love but that is totally brainless). When it came time to release it, Warner Bros. didn’t screen it for critics, which is usually a sign that a studio thinks it has a bomb on its hands. But Demolition Man opened at number one, stayed there for two weeks, and ended up collecting $160 million worldwide. What’s more, it ended up being reviewed relatively well, with both Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert crowing about it and wondering why Warner Bros. didn’t screen it. It’s a great movie with a trailer that does the job of getting you into the cinema but doesn’t hint at everything else going on beneath the surface. 7/10