How Much Damage Happened In Demolition Man?
“So now all restaurants are Taco Bell.”
Dystopian science fiction Demolition Man is quintessential viewing for anyone who loves 90s action films. Starting off in the then-near future of 1996, the film catapults you all the way to the year 2032. Demolition Man follows the ongoing battle of good and evil between Sylvester Stallone’s Sergeant John Spartan and Wesley Snipes’ Simon Phoenix. While the movie hasn’t spawned any further interest since its release in 1993, there is a small yet vocal cult following for this goofy gem.
The people at CinemaSins, the same people responsible for the “Everything Wrong With…” videos, are switching gears to another series of Internet videos called “What’s the Damage?”
They attempt to figure out the total cost of the mayhem created by various action movies. Considering that the movie’s name is Demolition Man, it’s fair to say that there’s a lot of damage, explosions, and tons of broken glass.
This video not only put the price of the damage done to San Angeles (the hybrid of Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and San Diego), but they also figured out the totals in the form of credits, the currency used in the Demolition Man future.
Demolition Man follows Spartan, a city cop wrongfully jailed for a crime he didn’t commit, while his nemesis Phoenix, also gets sent to jail for all the mayhem he committed to the city.
The twist is that Demolition Man takes place in a time when cryogenically freezing inmates is the norm. They never explain why freezing criminals is better than locking them up in jail, but it’s a movie, so let’s go with the premise. After Phoenix escapes, Sandra Bullock thaws Spartan out to track his nemesis down.
Demolition Man has problems with logic and technology, but it’s such fun and entertaining camp that it’s easy to gloss over any flaws. When it was released in 1993, Demolition Man got a lot of bad reviews for its goofy action and dumb story, but over the years, it has grown in the hearts of genre fans everywhere.
It seems that the film didn’t go far enough with its satire and was more content as a heavy-action movie. It’s an old-school film that you really don’t see nowadays. The closest action movie that fits this prototype is Roland Emmerich’s White House Down, in terms of ridiculous one-liners and over-the-top action sequences.
But with all the damage done to San Angeles, the biggest problem with the movie is that it never seems like it’s a really big city. The whole movie feels smaller than it should be. The property damage done in Demolition Man seems really isolated from the rest of the country.
Grand total of damage: $21 million or credits. Who benefits most from the film damage? Glass manufacturers.
