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#449 - Judge Dredd
Danny Cannon, 1995
In a futuristic dystopia where people live in gigantic cities that are governed by law enforcers known as "judges", one such judge ends up being wrongfully accused of murder.
It would be remiss of me to ignore the rather unforgiving reputation that hangs over Judge Dredd like a noxious smog, especially since I already managed to watch 2012's Dredd a couple of times and genuinely enjoyed it thanks to its rather simplistic Die Hard-style plot that got played for maximum effect. Judge Dredd, on the other hand, involves a slightly more complicated tale where the titular judge (Sylvester Stallone) is framed for murdering a journalist that openly criticised his particularly violent brand of justice. Thus begins the epic fight to escape from custody, prove his innocence and take down the people responsible, chief among them being a criminally insane former judge (Armand Assante) who has escaped from prison and is getting ready to take over the city. It's a lean enough plot and might have worked if the circumstances were different - unfortunately the execution is extremely shoddy. Having Stallone play the protagonist seems like a bad idea as his thick accent makes it hard to take his hard-bitten character seriously (it's pretty bad when his first line of dialogue is the character's iconic catchphrase and he delivers it like...this.) Even so, he still doesn't ham it up quite as badly as Assante does nor does he match up to notably superior actors like Jürgen Prochnow or Max von Sydow. Having Rob Schneider get thrown into the mix as a comic-relief sidekick (guaranteeing him a lot of screen-time in the process) is also a major misfire since he's the least funny thing about the movie, while Diane Lane doesn't fare much better as Dredd's partner.
As for the film's action aesthetic, well, it's very much rooted in both the '90s and the sensibilities that accompany your typical Stallone action film. The film spends much of its time bouncing between two extremely familiar settings - that of a fairly standard used-future metropolis where ordinary skyscrapers easily dwarf the Statue of Liberty plus the endless desert that exists outside the city walls and is populated by atavistic cannibals. Some decent production design is involved, but it is generally applied in such a hopelessly generic way that the film made me wish I was watching Demolition Man instead - at least some thought went into developing that world to be at least slightly different from all the usual grim, dark future worlds. Judge Dredd is a considerably awful movie that's good for the odd spot of cheese thanks to its mix of good and not-so-good actors (Rob Schneider is neither) but the action generally fails to be entertaining even by the standards of pulpy '90s sci-fi movies. Even if I hadn't already seen Dredd, I'd still think this was by and large a waste of time that is only intermittently entertaining and only ever in a bad way. For crimes against cinema, the sentence is...
Danny Cannon, 1995
In a futuristic dystopia where people live in gigantic cities that are governed by law enforcers known as "judges", one such judge ends up being wrongfully accused of murder.
It would be remiss of me to ignore the rather unforgiving reputation that hangs over Judge Dredd like a noxious smog, especially since I already managed to watch 2012's Dredd a couple of times and genuinely enjoyed it thanks to its rather simplistic Die Hard-style plot that got played for maximum effect. Judge Dredd, on the other hand, involves a slightly more complicated tale where the titular judge (Sylvester Stallone) is framed for murdering a journalist that openly criticised his particularly violent brand of justice. Thus begins the epic fight to escape from custody, prove his innocence and take down the people responsible, chief among them being a criminally insane former judge (Armand Assante) who has escaped from prison and is getting ready to take over the city. It's a lean enough plot and might have worked if the circumstances were different - unfortunately the execution is extremely shoddy. Having Stallone play the protagonist seems like a bad idea as his thick accent makes it hard to take his hard-bitten character seriously (it's pretty bad when his first line of dialogue is the character's iconic catchphrase and he delivers it like...this.) Even so, he still doesn't ham it up quite as badly as Assante does nor does he match up to notably superior actors like Jürgen Prochnow or Max von Sydow. Having Rob Schneider get thrown into the mix as a comic-relief sidekick (guaranteeing him a lot of screen-time in the process) is also a major misfire since he's the least funny thing about the movie, while Diane Lane doesn't fare much better as Dredd's partner.
As for the film's action aesthetic, well, it's very much rooted in both the '90s and the sensibilities that accompany your typical Stallone action film. The film spends much of its time bouncing between two extremely familiar settings - that of a fairly standard used-future metropolis where ordinary skyscrapers easily dwarf the Statue of Liberty plus the endless desert that exists outside the city walls and is populated by atavistic cannibals. Some decent production design is involved, but it is generally applied in such a hopelessly generic way that the film made me wish I was watching Demolition Man instead - at least some thought went into developing that world to be at least slightly different from all the usual grim, dark future worlds. Judge Dredd is a considerably awful movie that's good for the odd spot of cheese thanks to its mix of good and not-so-good actors (Rob Schneider is neither) but the action generally fails to be entertaining even by the standards of pulpy '90s sci-fi movies. Even if I hadn't already seen Dredd, I'd still think this was by and large a waste of time that is only intermittently entertaining and only ever in a bad way. For crimes against cinema, the sentence is...