Demolition Man is definitely in the lovable bad movie category. With probably 10-25% more work, it could have been a truly great movie, but it's still so much fun despite some of the dopier choices that don't really work.
Dopier choices by 1993 standards or dopier choices by 2024 standards? I haven't seen the movie in years, I probably should watch it again sometime.
Yeah. That's such a weird cultural bias. If it's not completely stone-faced serious it must be bad. You get the same response for out-and-out comedies. People bizarrely trying to analyze them like they're dour tragedies. "But what does it mean when Larry gets poked in the eye in scene 24?" Lighten up people. Not everything needs to be serious all the time.
I think on some level it's possible to determine if a movie, or a novel, or a song, or whatever succeeds at doing what it sets out to do, and to use that to determine if it's good--which can be an entirely different then than whether one likes it. Sometimes even that might be too murky to parse, I guess then you need to decide whether the movie (or novel (or song (or whatever))) is supposed to be anything and/or whether the maker/s knew what they were trying to make.
Dopey by 1993 standards. No one, even at the time, thought it was great art. It was a cult favorite right from the start.
You can not take yourself seriously but also try to dot all your "i"s and cross all your "t"s. Compare to Raising Arizona, which also aggressively doesn't take itself seriously, but which is much more polished.
