4. John Spartan - Demolition Man (1993)
Spoilers,
as Ive said before, are everywhere these days, but with the internet in its infancy back in 1993, Demolition Man was one of those films that you only really knew about from the trailer. What that meant was a splendid surprise when you eventually got to see it. Its a bonkers premise of course. Stallones super cop John Spartan and his nemesis, Wesley Snipes as Simon Pheonix, are frozen in 1996 and revived nearly 40 years later to a world where swearing, sex and violence just dont happen anymore. Taken seriously, those names and that set-up would be nonsense, but its clear that everyone is totally aware of the silliness and plays up to it. Stallone is the perfect choice for the man out of time, riffing on his 80s persona and having a ball bringing beret-wearing chaos to the future as he hunts down Phoenix. Its a rough and ready take on Brave New World (theres even a character called Huxley) only with tons of guns, kung-fu, satire, ratburgers, great one-liners, gore, knitting, virtual-love, eyeballs on pens and people getting their frozen heads smashed off. Add in a "as good as she was in Speed, only a bit saucier" performance by Sandra Bullock, Nigel Hawthorne as a plummy villain (English accent, of course - he's a bad guy), and a running gag about three sea-shells, and youve got a cracking action romp with a ton of quotable dialogue. Enjoyment as big as those famous biceps.