Demolition Man is a 1993 American science fiction action film directed by Marco Brambilla in his directorial debut. It stars Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, and Nigel Hawthorne. Stallone plays John Spartan, a risk-taking police officer with a reputation for causing destruction while carrying out his work. After a failed attempt to rescue hostages from evil crime lord Simon Phoenix (Snipes), they are both sentenced to be cryogenically frozen in 1996. In 2032, Phoenix escapes and the authorities awaken Spartan to help capture him. The story makes allusions to many other works, including Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World and H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes.

Plot

In 1996, psychopathic criminal Simon Phoenix kidnaps a bus full of passengers and takes refuge in an abandoned building. Los Angeles Police Department Sergeant John Spartan, nicknamed "The Demolition Man" for the collateral damage he often causes in apprehending suspects, mounts an unauthorized assault to capture Phoenix. When a thermal scan of the area reveals no trace of the hostages, he raids the building and confronts Phoenix, who sets off explosives to destroy everything. The hostages' corpses are found in the rubble, and Phoenix claims that Spartan knew about the hostages but attacked anyway. Both men are sentenced to lengthy prison terms in the city's "California Cryo-Penitentiary", in which convicts are cryogenically frozen and undergo subliminal rehabilitation techniques.