10 Action Movie Flops That Deserve A Second Chance

In the wake of Cliffhanger, Sylvester Stallone could do no right and turned out one flop after another (Judge Dredd, The Specialist, Assassins etc) before returning to the Rocky and Rambo franchises. Not only is Demolition Man the pick of the flops, it’s the movie that predicted life in George W Bush’s America.

In the film, Stallone wakes up after 36 years of deep-freeze hibernation to find himself in a society torn in half by Dr Raymond Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne), a charismatic yet cold-hearted man of deep spiritual beliefs who takes a my-way-or-the-highway attitude to his flock. If you don’t want to live in a society where profanity, pornography and rock music are illegal, and you think the Doc is too conservative, you can starve in a sewer with the rest of the “scraps”.

While this group organizes, Cocteau awakens Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes), Stallone’s long-ago nemesis, and sends him to kill their leader, Edgar Friendly. Friendly is played by comic-turned-actor Denis Leary, which is ironic – a decade after the film’s release, Bush’s harshest critic was Michael Moore, a comic-turned-filmmaker who won the Palme d’Or for Fahrenheit 9/11.