I don't understand Cocteau's plan

people in charge do stupid and terrible things.

His crimes are of pretension and hypocrisy. He pretends he is a good guy, but he is really a dictator. Everyone does what he says, but he's taking away freedoms.

San Angeles is probably more of a city state and probably isn't part of what was the US.

Cocteau was mad. He had absolute power, because all of the people on the surface were clueless what to do. Ed Friendly was the only person who was a threat to him ( or so he thought).

If they had thrown in a line about how Cocteau had included in Phoenix’s rehab program that Phoenix would kill himself once Friendly was dead, that would have at least made it appear Cocteau had thought his plan through. There could even have been a short debate between John Spartan and Huxley about whether or not they should just kill Friendly themselves to force Phoenix to kill himself. It might have been interesting to see how each of them felt about the “sacrifice one for the good of the many” argument. But as it is, Cocteau just seems incredibly foolish and naïve.

Maybe he had other targets in mind for Phoenix to take care of after Friendly. Perhaps he had it programed that Phoenix would always need a Cocteau to give him someone new to stakeout and kill, and Cocteau would keep giving him the names of the new leaders of the underworld, or anyone else who was disrupting his perfect society. Phoenix would be like a shark, in that he always has to be hunting someone, or he would die.

Stupid and poor as is the whole movie (in all fairness most Stallone flicks are).

Someone had thoughts on a Cocteau novel. Maybe in the epilogue following him killed this could be restored at the cryo-prison when John Spartan fights Jesse Ventura's character (the one who killed Raymond Cocteau) after killing new members of Simon Phoenix's gang. It should be in the very end John Spartan defeating the Jesse Ventura character. Manly movie site said a running tackle.

Also he never considered when releasing Phoenix's henchmen that he could get one of them to kill him (Cocteau). Which was obvious to anyone with even a double digit IQ.

Maaaybe you could say Cocteau thought he had an agreement with Phoenix but still it's dumb writing.

It's a shame that Sir Humphrey is so clever and competent in Yes, Minister, but so awful and ridiculously cartoony and stupid here.

His plans make no sense, he really doesn't take advantage of his power to consolidate it and gain more power, or anything.

I guess the (feeble) point is that Friendly is 'intelligent rebel', whereas the thugs he thawed were just dumb thugs, easy to dispose of.

However, Cocteau didn't really make the kind of contingengy plans Sir Humphrey Appleby would definitely have. I would have LOVED if this movie properly utilized his talent and amazing capabilities to create a similar network of lies and corruption as shown in 'Yes, Minister'. That would've been absolutely exciting and brilliant.

Cocteau really made many stupid mistakes. I guess it's because villains have to be stupid, or movies can't happen (sigh).

What he COULD have done..

1) Gas the underground with, if not poison, at least some kind of hallucinogen, sleeping gas, some kind of drug that the underground people become addicted to, and thus, his slaves. Offer them free food that has some kind of addictive, memory erasing, hallucinogenic - - well, you can easily continue from here - - to the 'rebels', thus removing their reason for rebelling. Offer them free clothing and such.

I mean, if a big underground rebel group can happen, you are not doing it right. If Cocteau did this like Humphrey would do it, then it would be a SLOW, gradual, subtle change that not even Friendly could resist. Everything would be fine, just 'slightly' more restrictive each year (just like in our world.. uh,oh!)

2) Have the general public against the rebels. Paint them as something YOU can do something about, give all the 'citizens' free tazers and training to use them and so on. Run this kind of PSAs on TV all the time.

3) Give cops enough power and competence to be able to handle a group like this, and have them training specialized scouts to infiltrate those rebel groups and so on.