More than I expected!

I received much more than I expected. Not only did it arrived quickly, it was a 2-sided DVD - both wide-screen and full-screen versions. It was in excellent condition.

dinner and dancing at the taco bell

This movie is quite the futuristic hoot. Taco Bell has won the fast food wars and is now a fine restaurant. Arnold Schwarzenegger was once president of America. If you curse, you get a ticket violation, no matter where you are. The outfits that people wear on a typical occasion are more like costume robes. Physical touch is no longer allowed between partners, and is only done by virtual means instead. And lastly, the Los Angeles area is now clean and all the suburbs have formed a new city known as San Angeles. Well, its all just a part of the humor added to this film, which surprisingly is a highly entertaining B action movie, with some of today's above average B movie stars.

While Sly Stallone is our main man and cop hero, Wesley Snipes and Sandra Bullock steal the show too with their abundant screen time. Snipes is the villain in this movie, and his character is completely opposite than want you would typically see in his most popular films, the Blade series. Though he is the hero in Blade, it is obvious he has a very dark, villainous side in those films. But in Demolition Man, he is more like a Dennis Rodman charcater (and looks like him too), who jokes at everything and everyone while either killing them or blowing up the place. Sandra Bullock is the young cop, who's passion is for nostalgia L.A. She is the cop who wants something to actually go wrong in this perfect future, and her wish comes true when Simon Phoenix (Snipes) is brought back after about 30 years of cryo-freeze, once again wreaking havoc on the city. John Spartan (Sly) is brought back to catch him, since he is the only one who knows how to tame a criminal of the past.

This movie has quite a bit of action, and just about everything you could ask for - guns, explosions, car chases, and fist fights. Its basically Stallone vs Snipes throughout this film, and their presence alone in the action scenes kicks it up a notch compared to most action actors. Their final fight in the film is less than 2 minutes, but it is fast and hard-hitting and I still enjoyed it quite a bit. In addition to the action, there is plenty of humor in the film too. The plot is not extensive, but this kind of movie just doesn't need it.

Demolition Man comes off as very silly at first, but it does have a way of engaging you. Whether its the humor or the fun characters, action fans might just want to add this to their collection.

Projecting present trends into the future

The future: A split has developed between the uptight politically correct media-academia fascists on the one hand and the hippies, and the latter have literally been driven underground where they are free to do and think what they want except that, since everybody in the world above has been implanted with a microchip to enable the society has keep tabs on them, there is no money and the hippies cannot get any food except by raiding a food truck now and then.

The designer and hence Leader of this Santa Barbara - Los Angeles - San Diego megalopolis is annoyed with the hippies and thaws out an old-style psychopath to get rid of them. The psycho, however, has megalomanical plans of his own. We are not told what the rest of the United States is like, but it is certainly indicated that this megalopolis is independent, so we can guess that other megalopolises formed to deal with the urban riots of the past and have developed various other totalitarian societies. Perhaps the more rural States still have some semblance of American democracy. It would have been nice to have more information on this society of the future, but such appears to have exceeded both the knowledge and the interest of the filmmakers.

Yes, there is the usual action, but it is not as well motivated as when Sly writes part of the script. (See The Specialist which came out the same year.) The only other flaw in the action aspect was that the end (the defeat of the bad guy) was too abrupt.

If the Amazon reviewer had watched and listened to the audio commentary, he would have known that even for the Hispanic filmmaker, this is "political correctness run amok", not a picture of a "conservative" society, as the Amazonian so naively remarks.

Sandra Bullock adds a dash of comic spice to the mix.

In sum: an entertaining reflection on some future possibilities if present trends continue.