DEMOLITION MAN

  • (Has redeeming facet) Directed by Marco Brambilla Written by Daniel Waters, Robert Reneau, and Peter M. Lenkov With Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, and Nigel Hawthorne.

Unlike Addams Family Values, Demolition Man can’t be said to derive literally from cartoons, though there are times when its basic premises seem to come straight out of Andrew Dice Clay stand-up routines–and not just because one of its principal screenwriters, Daniel Waters, worked on The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. Consider the ingredients: a ghetto criminal with blond hair named Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes), who likes to kill people for the fun of it; muscle-bound “demolition man” John Spartan (Stallone), an LA police sergeant hunting Phoenix with equal abandon; a future America that has outlawed salt, meat, cigarettes, cuss words, violence, sexual intercourse, and Playboy (which still exists or doesn’t, depending on the scene). They’re all part of a kvetching Clay premise diced into gags aimed at exploiting an audience’s petty irritations without any thought being entertained.

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After surviving a cataclysmic airplane crash in California in which his business partner is killed, and heroically leading other passengers to safety, a San Francisco architect named Max (Jeff Bridges) returns to his wife (Isabella Rossellini) and young son a profoundly changed man–oddly euphoric and seemingly fearless, yet remote from and indifferent to the needs of his family. The only person he can establish some feeling of intimacy with and concern for is another survivor of the crash, a grief-stricken young housewife named Carla (Rosie Perez) who lost her baby in it.

MY LIFE

** (Worth seeing) Directed and written by Bruce Joel Rubin With Michael Keaton, Nicole Kidman, Bradley Whitford, Queen Latifah, Michael Constantine, and Haing S. Ngor.

Even before he gets the bad news, Bob is a prosperous businessman with a beautiful, loving, and admiring wife, a comfortable home, and no apparent financial worries or career frustrations–just a poor Ukrainian family back in Detroit that he avoids, including a father who resents him for changing his last name from Ivanovich to Jones, and a fear of riding roller coasters. Both these nagging problems, as well as his fear of dying before his child is born, are efficiently licked before the movie’s over.