Being familiar with the early 90's is not sufficient.
You have to have lived through them to fully appreciate a masterpiece like this.

It really IS a pretty edgy movie despite being the result of a Hollywood dumbbing down (or so I heard). It also has the second best Lannister in it too as a badass glass-eyed sharpshooter death machine.

One of the most important of those 90's experience is watching this movie get released alongside Jurassic Park.

I sincerely believe that this movie was at least a few years ahead of its time.

My favorite part was how the cartoonishly evil movie villain seemed (at first) genuinely upset by real-world evil. When propositioned by a haggard young streetwalker with an obvious substance abuse problem, he looks appalled and asks "How old are you?" Upon witnessing a man shot to death during a mugging, he's shocked to find the assailants were only after the victim's Nikes.

I loved this movie. I think the main problem was a misguided ad campaign.

I should give it another chance. When I saw it in the theatre it was before I saw any of the movies it was referencing (including McTiernan's own Die Hard and Predator) so I was sort of out of the loop, and I remember really hating it. I also didn't know Ian McKellan from Adams Apple though so maybe I was just too young, wanting more R-rated action and violence and missing the humor and fun.

Zest, that was part of the "misguided" marketing I talked about. A lot of viewers, particularly kids, felt they'd been "baited & switched" with promises of an action movie only to get what mostly amounted to a spoof of one.