Demolition Man is a 1993 American science fiction action film directed by Marco Brambilla in his directorial debut. It stars Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, and Nigel Hawthorne. Stallone is John Spartan, a risk-taking police officer who has a reputation for causing destruction while carrying out his work. After a failed attempt to rescue hostages from evil crime lord Simon Phoenix (Snipes), they are both sentenced to be cryogenically frozen in 1996. Phoenix is thawed for a parole hearing in 2032, but escapes. Society has changed and all crime has seemingly been eliminated. Unable to deal with a criminal as dangerous as Phoenix, the authorities awaken Spartan to help capture him again. The story makes allusions to many other works including Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World and H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes.
The film was released in the United States on October 8, 1993, to mixed reviews from critics. It earned $159 million worldwide, and was considered a successful film for Stallone.
Plot
In 1996, psychopathic career criminal Simon Phoenix kidnaps a busload of hostages and takes refuge in an abandoned building. LAPD Sergeant John Spartan, nicknamed "The Demolition Man" for the large amounts of collateral damage he often causes in apprehending suspects, mounts an unauthorized assault to capture Phoenix. When a thermal scan of the area reveals no trace of the hostages, he raids the building and confronts Phoenix, who sets off explosives to destroy it. The hostages' corpses are later found in the rubble, and Phoenix claims that Spartan knew about them and attacked anyway. Both men are sentenced to lengthy terms in the city's new "California Cryo-Penitentiary", a prison in which convicts are cryogenically frozen and exposed to subliminal rehabilitation techniques.
In 2032, the city of San Angeles – a megalopolis formed from the merger of Los Angeles, San Diego, and Santa Barbara – is a seemingly peaceful utopia designed and run by Dr. Raymond Cocteau. Phoenix is thawed for a parole hearing and escapes from the cryo-prison by saying a secret password, without knowing how he had learned it. He subsequently murders his guards and the warden, making his way into the city where he easily overpowers and kills several police officers who have never had to deal with violent crime. Lieutenant Lenina Huxley, an idealistic officer who is fascinated with 20th-century culture, learns about Spartan's career from veteran officer Zachary Lamb, who suggests the best chance to stop Phoenix is to enlist an officer with the experience and mindset needed to anticipate his actions. Huxley persuades her superiors to parole Spartan and reinstate him to active duty. Spartan finds life in San Angeles to be sterile and oppressive, since all types of behavior deemed immoral or unhealthy, such as sports, alcohol, swearing, eating meat, and having sex have been declared illegal. Conversely, many members of the police department and the public view Spartan as savage and uncivilized, while Huxley idolizes him.
Anticipating that Phoenix will attempt to secure firearms, Spartan has Huxley lead him to a museum and finds Phoenix looting an exhibit of weapons. To Spartan's surprise, Phoenix is even deadlier than before. Phoenix escapes and holds Cocteau at gunpoint, but is unable to kill him, as Cocteau had implanted a command in his rehabilitation program to prevent him from doing so. Cocteau instead orders Phoenix to kill Edgar Friendly, the leader of a resistance group called the Scraps who refuse to conform to Cocteau's moral ideals and who live in the underground ruins of old Los Angeles.
Spartan and Huxley witness this exchange on security cameras and review the cryo-prison records. They discover that Phoenix's rehabilitation program was tailored by Cocteau to make him even more dangerous than he was in 1996, including martial arts, computer hacking, knowledge of torture techniques, and murderous impulses; by contrast, Spartan's program taught him to knit and sew. As the pair deduce that Friendly is being targeted for murder, Phoenix persuades Cocteau to release additional cryo-prisoners for his gang and leads them underground to pursue Friendly. Having previously encountered the Scraps during a food raid at a restaurant, Spartan and Huxley venture underground and save Friendly from an assassination attempt by Phoenix. Phoenix taunts Spartan with the revelation that he had framed Spartan for the deaths of the 1996 hostages, who were already dead before the building exploded. Phoenix escapes to the cryo-prison, and Spartan borrows weapons from the Scraps and pursues him.