DEMOLITION MAN

DEMOLITION MAN (Directed by Marco Brambilla. Starring Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, Nigel Hawthorne)

Producer Joel Silver brought you the Lethal Weapon series and both Die Hards, as well as Predator, Commando, 48 Hours and The Last Boy Scout, so his credentials as a purveyor of macho mayhem are well established. And Sylvester Stallone needs no introduction: a grunt will suffice. After a brief spell trying to establish himself as a kind of muscular Cary Grant, the man who has done more for steroid abuse than all the Soviet Olympic teams of the last 20 years has joined forces with Silver to give his public what they want: a shot of celluloid testosterone.

Demolition Man features the usual amount of carnage: bone crushing punch ups, blazing shootouts, destructive car chases, a body count like a bad day in Yugoslavia and the complete destruction of an inordinate amount of apparently well constructed buildings (hence the title). The only thing out of place is the soundtrack.

Apart from Sting's predictable remake of the title track, it forswears the usual mix and match of hip hop and rock classics in favour of tracks like 'Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz', 'The Armoury Hot Dog Jingle', 'Good Things From The Garden', 'My Dog's Better Than Your Dog' and that perennial favourite 'Come Alive (You're In The Pepsi Generation)'. Somehow I don't see an album tie-in storming the charts.

This is not the latest development in movie product placement or subliminal advertising. It is the easy listening choice of the grown up Pepsi generation. Demolition Man conjures up a future where jingles are the golden oldies and the happy citizens break out into spontaneous choruses of the Jolly Green Giant song.

Anything deemed bad for the health has been eradicated, from smoking to spicy food. The police have nothing more serious to deal with than outbreaks of swearing, which are met with automatic fines. Despite the clean streets and absence of crime, this new age, brave new world is more dystopian than utopian, run by a benign dictator and apparently terrorised by a stand-up comedian (Denis Leary, who puts aside characterisation in favour of performing his MTV schtick on the big screen).

Stallone, as a macho cop (he'll fight anything except typecasting) cryogenically frozen in 1996 and re-animated in 2032, provides the alternatively cynical and bemused contemporary perspective in what transpires to be a witty and energetic sci-fi comedy masquerading as action adventure. Stallone has to come to grips with a world in which his brand of machismo redundant. When he greets an old (now very old) friend with some jovial profanity, someone dryly notes, "This is how insecure heterosexual men used to bond."

Like the best science fiction, this is more about our times than the future it is ostensibly set in. Painted with very broad brush-strokes, Demolition Man works best as a satire on political correctness, with some old-fashioned, right-wing brutality saving the well-meaning liberals from their own best intentions.

The plot is straight from the pen of Doctor Preposterous. Stallone is pitted against a standard issue 20th century movie villain, Simon Phoenix, a New Jack City bad-ass crossed with The Joker. He is gleefully portrayed as Wesley Snipes, who spends most of his screen time laughing maniacally and picking up swearing fines.

When he escapes from his cryogenic prison the unarmed future cops are unequipped to deal with his violent ways. "Lie down on the ground, or else!" is the best they can come up with as arrest procedure, before calling into base for further instructions, complaining: "Maniac has responded with a scornful remark."

Stallone is defrosted and battle commences, with world domination at stake. But the action scenes, although big, loud and kinetically adrenalinised, are the dullest thing on offer here. First time director Mario Brambilla is a protégé of Ridley and Tony Scott who has served his apprenticeship in advertising. He stages everything effectively and expensively but maintains no narrative drive.

It is the plethora of comic observations of the Californian future, and a vein of self-deprecatory jokes at the expense of the action man genre that makes Demolition Man such an enjoyable romp.

Stallone, who has failed to convince audiences of his comic gift in a series of straight ahead comedies, finally manages to have his beefcake and eat it too, with the clever one-liners scoring higher than the brain dead punch-outs. And for once this is not a violent film with a blatantly hypocritical anti-violence message.

In Demolition Man it takes might to make the right on come to their senses. "Hurting people's not a good thing," says Sly, before pausing to apparently digest what this could mean for his career. "Well, sometimes it is," he concludes.