John Spartan and Simon Phoenix. A battle for the ages!
If you haven't seen Demolition Man, you need to crawl out from under your rock and get watching! John Spartan (played by Sylvester Stallone) is a Los Angeles cop from the 90's (the futuristic 90's) who's probably the craziest dude on the force. He's known for his extreme methods of bringing justice so he is nicknamed the Demolition Man. Spartan has been hunting the top criminal in L.A., Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes), for years and finally has the opportunity to bring him in. He breaks into Phoenix's lair to find a group of hostages he had taken because a thermal scan of the building showed only Phoenix's men inside. After fighting Phoenix and demolishing the lair, it is then confirmed that the bodies of the hostages were, in fact, inside. So Spartan is arrested alongside Phoenix....but in the futuristic 90's, prison is not inside a cage...no, prison is being frozen solid for a certain amount of years.
Fast forward to the year 2032 and we have a peaceful zen society called San Angeles where people don't know how to fight and are living a Mr Roger's Neighborhood life. The violent 90's are ancient history and can only be experienced in museums. In the prison, Phoenix is thawed out in the year and escapes. Each prisoner who is thawed out is immediately tagged with a tracking device and implanted with a special skill that is beneficial to society like sewing, cooking, etc... Phoenix, however, has no device tagged to him and has more than one skill; he now has military training, combat training, weapons training, technology skill, communication skills, and a slew of other skills!
When the society can't handle Phoenix's violence, they call on the one man who was able to stop him in the past: John Spartan! Spartan is thawed out and the chaos begins! San Angeles is turned into ground zero for the epic battle between two dinosaurs!
Assisting Spartan is young Officer Huxley (Sandra Bullock) who is captivated by the 'old school' police days and by the past in general. You have to see this film if you haven't yet!! Great action, great acting, great special effects and a really good story!
My Rating:
4.5028137913 out of 5 stars
I WANT A SEQUEL! (Warning: the following contains spoilers for Demolition Man. If you haven't seen it and don't want to know what happens, don't read on until you see it!)
Have you seen Stallone's movies from 2005 through the present? I feel his last great movie was Assassins (with Antonio Banderas) back in 95, then after a 10 year lag in good movies for him (and significant aging on his face), he burst back into the limelight in 2006 with Rocky Balboa and hasn't let up yet! The old guy is showing he's still got the stuff and you can see him actually appearing to get younger with every movie he's made since Balboa. Look at him in Rambo, then both Expendables movies, and now with his new upcoming flick Bullet to the Head he looks like he's still in the best shape of his life and he can still go.
So with all these intense action laden movies he's had recently, why not bring back the intense action of Demolition Man?
Well, let's think about this:
Yes, Simon Phoenix is dead. So apologies to Mr Snipes but his career will have to be revived somewhere else.
Here are some scenarios I thought of:
Scenario #1
Remember that Huxley was incredibly interested in the past? Well she couldn't have been the only one. What if someone who is criminally insane is also obsessed with the violence of the past, but in a much more sinister way than Huxley? What if this person witnessed some of the chaos that ensued between Phoenix & Spartan and has been plotting their own way to take the cop down? Hmm...who could play that role? Someone young, but not too young...they need to be able to carry the 'bad guy' role on their own convincingly.
I say: Hugh Jackman
Before you lynch me, hear me out....I haven't seen him play a bad guy yet and I think the change of character would be great for him. He's a very dedicated actor and has the look to be the type of guy who could be serious and physically violent (Wolverine anyone?). I think a well choreographed fight scene between Jackman and Stallone would be epic!
Wolverine vs John Spartan!
Huxley mentions very briefly that she has found Spartan's daughter, but he refuses to see her because it's been too long. What if someone one of Phoenix's men that escaped spent years planning and kidnaps her or Spartan's grandchild and wreaks havoc on the city while Spartan looks for his missing family member? Maybe they torture and/or kill Huxley...or maybe the torture and/or kill Spartan's old friend whom we briefly met, Zack? Hmmm...who could play THAT role? It would have to be someone closer to Stallone's age as Phoenix and his men seemed to be the same age as him.
I see Liev Schreiber being a great leading criminal for this. Armed with mutton chops, a mullet and a really bad attitude (a lot like he was in the movie Goon), he'd be a great bad guy who could make a physical fight with Stallone look really violent using his surroundings.
Scenario #3
San Angeles has been ravaged because of the war between Spartan and Phoenix, at the end of Demolition Man, it is implied that there will be a change in the order of things in San Angeles, a sort of return to the old L.A. What if after a few years the change is not complete yet? We have a still transforming San Angeles where police aren't completely trained yet, but are learning...but what we don't know yet is that a crime lord sees great opportunity for the growth of his empire in San Angeles because it's littered with new clients who have not experienced his product yet? Spartan, being an old school cop, sees the game before it unfolds and tries to stop this new criminal and his army. Now we can bring in Edgar Friendly with his faithful followers and we have a full fledged Dark Knight Rises scenario!! The criminal could be anyone of any age, he'd just have to be awesome in his role!
This one is kind of a 3 way tie:
Choice 1:
First, I see a ruthless Mickey Rourke (very much like his character in Immortals but with the fighting ability and threshold for pain like his role in Sin City) being an unforgiving and mayhem inducing drug lord trying to take out Spartan so he can take over the streets.
Choice 2:
My other choice would be insane killer crime kingpin Gerard Butler (think of him with his fighting skill from Gamer but with a bad attitude and a knack for killing innocents and rivals alike) with his right hand man Vinnie Jones (his sadistic nature in The Condemned mixed with his strong silence in Gone in Sixty Seconds would be perfect here) trying to move in on San Angeles.
Well that's my input. Any ideas out there? With Stallone making great action films again, I can see the reintroduction of a classic Stallone character making a HUGE splash, if done right!
What do you think? Any scenarios? Or is it a pipe dream that I should just let go of?
"Send a maniac to catch a maniac"
Jay
No comments:
Post a Comment