I think there was a certain elemnt of good humor to it that keeps it tolerable. The whole la crime hell sequence in the beginning seemed over the top enough that I think it was deliberate parody and stallone's character is a self-satire of the 80s super-murder-cop guy who turns out to actually have some emotional intelligence and isn't just a violent killer. The core message is something like California hippy-fascism is bad and utopia is boring, but not that utopia is outright bad. It does have an anti-igentrification thing going with all the clean hippy fascist places being dull and lifeless, excluding poor people to literally live underground for not being sanitized enough. The underground crime rebels are shown being almost as naive and gentle as the hippy fascists when confronted with Simon Phoenix, which to me at least suggests the authors weren't intending a completely reactionary reading of utopia as bad.
The movie had action movie banger line after banger line, including the novelty of "lady of the future trying really hard to say tough guy talk from the past."
"DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO" turning into goblincore squatting.
Lol.
I think there was a certain elemnt of good humor to it that keeps it tolerable. The whole la crime hell sequence in the beginning seemed over the top enough that I think it was deliberate parody and stallone's character is a self-satire of the 80s super-murder-cop guy who turns out to actually have some emotional intelligence and isn't just a violent killer. The core message is something like California hippy-fascism is bad and utopia is boring, but not that utopia is outright bad. It does have an anti-igentrification thing going with all the clean hippy fascist places being dull and lifeless, excluding poor people to literally live underground for not being sanitized enough. The underground crime rebels are shown being almost as naive and gentle as the hippy fascists when confronted with Simon Phoenix, which to me at least suggests the authors weren't intending a completely reactionary reading of utopia as bad.
The movie had action movie banger line after banger line, including the novelty of "lady of the future trying really hard to say tough guy talk from the past."
And then later...