Culturegeeks

First, read this.

Next, tell Entertainment Weekly to fuck itself, and watch Demolition Man again.

I just downloaded it again, since I remember watching it fondly with Roby back in Boulder. As it turns out, it comes out not as dated as you’d expect.

Of course, it starts out with Los Angeles, in 1996, as a warzone with antiaircraft fire, shit blowing up all over the place, and just total chaos. So, yeah, not to dead-on there, but rarely can you ding a SciFi movie in the past for getting the time at which things go to hell off by a few decades.

To set the scene: Sly Stallone plays a cop who doesn’t care how much damage he causes to get his man. Wesley “Get me a real accountant” Snipes plays his man. Shit blows up. They both get frozen as a punishment. This was in ‘93, which made this the inspiration for perhaps the slowest portion of the first Austin Powers movie.

Now, I’ll fully admit that the main reason I redownloaded this to watch it was the fact that all restaurants were Taco Bell. I have a well-publicized soft-spot for taco bell.

I figured that it had probably been over 5 years since watching it, and given that it was an early-90s action movie, I didn’t expect much. In fact, as I started watching, I started drawing comparisons between it and Last Action Hero. I had just seen LAH less than a year ago, and while not as bad as I remembered it it was…basically just not as bad as I remembered.

They were both (shallowly) deconstructions of action movies of the time, but everywhere that LAH failed, DM succeeded. I kept finding myself laughing at the background buzz every time someone sweared, the misspoken historical jargon (“You really licked his ass John Spartan!”), really most of it just worked.

So, yeah. Watch it again. Especially Roby.