Judge Dredd
Comic book movies are not as simple to make as one may think, and they certainly involve much more than just adapting a particular book frame by frame into screenplay form (as Alex Tse reportedly did with his Watchmen script before it was subjected to severe rewrites). One of the reasons for this is that despite the action packed storylines, many comic books are just flat out POORLY WRITTEN, with characters so overly fantastical that they resemble no one ever in our real world, along with (lots of) dialogue that is so banal that they can make the more literate folks among us cringe. But then it also seems that the producers of these films are somehow bound and determined to please first and foremost the loyal fans of any given comic book being adapted, despite those same people actually being the vast minority of the true potential ticket buying audience, and what usually benefits the more normal, movie loving types going into these types of films is to basically have ZERO familiarity at all with the characters being adapted into a film (aside from being fully aware of the obvious notion that the film IS actually based on a past comic book source) and thus be able to judge more fairly if the finished product really is just a great, entertaining action movie, period. This was the situation that Hollywood faced back in 1995 when the first of two major movie adaptations was produced for the character of Judge Joseph Dredd, a British created comic book icon with an entire mythos built around the concept of a futuristic society where most of the Earth was unhabitable and the masses had then been crowded into overpopulated major cities which had led to an huge outbreak of crime and violence which in turn had brought about the age of The Judges, badass and fearsome upholders of The Law, armed to the teeth but more significantly, given the leeway to immediately review a crime scene upon arrest and to summarily pronounce swift judgment on those who have been found guilty, even up to and including the punishment of death, and naturally, Dredd was the most feared and respected of these types of enforcers. Upon the casting of Sylvester Stallone in the lead role, someone who had long since been known at this point as an action movie innovator and legend, it became obvious that given Stalloneās age and stature that this was NOT going to be an origin story of any kind for the character, with Dreddās background quickly explained through some expositionary dialogue. But what was even more interesting was that when Stallone did some homework on the character to find out just what he had gotten himself into (reportedly having had little to no prior knowledge of the comic book itself), he learned that Dredd as a character had literally NO PERSONALITY WHATSOEVER, carrying out his duties with a robotic diligence while NEVER, EVER taking off his helmet (a sticking point for many of the comicās fans) and was basically little more than just a walking cyborg in human form, with this actually being the way that director Danny Cannon had literally intended to portray him in the movie as well, but Stallone would prove to have other plans, having the script rewritten while actually going so far as to tweak and entirely subvert the Dredd persona, pissing the diehard fans off but succeeding in giving himself an actual role to play here. The strategy works, with the beautiful opening shots of MegaCity 1 evoking the flying scenes of Ridley Scottās Blade Runner but with a heavier color aesthetic, leading to the opening 20 minutes fully establishing Stallone as the Dredd character who is already known and loved by fans of the comic for many years, until of course the inevitable moment comes when Stallone takes off the helmet and brings the character back down to Earth. Furthering that, the whole point of the main story is in essence to take Dredd completely out of his own element, as the most famous lawman of his time has now been framed for murders that he did not commit, found guilty by a panel of his peers, and then sentenced to life imprisonment, from which he must escape and return to the city to clear his name and also find those who had set him up, which for obvious reasons, was a storyline that they had never run with in the comics as just the idea of having Dredd being carted off to prison itself would have no doubt required the removal of his precious helmet not to mention manage to throw other monkey wrenches in the rigidly tight continuity of these stories. Stalloneās more humanistic portrayal of Dredd shows a law enforcement legend who nonetheless has accepted what he considers to be the standard, de facto loneliness of a job such as his, with the tenets of the law that he upholds being seen by him as more of an obsessive religion that he swears by rather than just a mere written set of rules, all while he also expects all the other judges to maintain the strict discipline that he himself displays. But he also remains haunted by the memory of the only other judge whom he had ever seen āgo badā, his one time best friend and ābrotherā whom he himself had judged, and who had been locked away in a maximum security facility only to now escape and return to the city to begin his own rampage of revenge: Rico, played by Armand Assante in what has to be one of THE most underrated bad guy performances ever. Assante stomps his way throughout the movie, essaying even in unspoken closeups the unbridled live wire, uncaged animal aura that he has about him as we realize that he is fully capable of literally killing anyone at anytime, including his own co-conspirators. Physically a good match for Stallone, but more importantly, someone whose master plan is to do away with the fragile sense of order put in place by The Judges and unleash a new age of sheer, unadulterated anarchy in the kill or be killed sense, with himself as the unstable supreme ruler, quite a bad guy in many ways played perfectly by the always underrated Assante. In other roles, Max Von Sydow brings a touch of class and dignity to the proceedings as The Chief Justice (leader) of this society, Diane Lane is a beautiful piece of work as the more idealistic female Judge who tries to bring Dredd out of his shell, Jurgen Prochnow registers well as a more duplitious member of The Supreme Council, Joan Chen is given little to do as a genetic scientist who is a part of the main plot, and last but certainly least, we have Rob Schneider as the twerpy, whiny comic relief sidekick to Dredd on his prison escape, a little act that he does that is funny for about the first half of the film, but soon has the viewer longing for him to finally just catch a stray bullet already. With a massive $70 million dollar budget, the money certainly appears to be all up there on the screen, with some stunningly fantastic visuals throughout in the pre-CGI era creating a virtual whole new world of the future for this story to take place in, even as the story at hand gets more and more out of control as the movie goes on, turning into a literal maelstrom of violence that sees seemingly innocent judges who are just following orders pursuing the fugitive Dredd on sky cycles around the city wind up meeting their own untimely ends, and that doesnāt even factor in Assanteās unstable Rico literally making up all new rules in his game as he goes along with his own psychopathic dreams of megalomania. While there are certainly whiffs of what could have been with additional character development scenes and even more graphic and gory carnage, what it all amounts to in the end is an action packed sci fi extravaganza that while it didnāt turn out to be exactly thought provoking, it certainly makes the grade as an overwhelmingly entertaining piece of work anchored by a game cast, a spectacular if woefully underappreciated villain, and one of the greatest stars that the genre has ever known literally working overtime to make this into something special so that all open minded viewers can really enjoy it for what it is, not just the small handful who in essence gave up their own lives so that now they all can read their pulpy comicsā¦
9/10