Judge Dredd

There are few times that I will intentionally sit down to watch what I assume is a bad movie. Most of those times stem from the weird fascination with Hollywood disasters - what possessed these people to make these movies at these times? Judge Dredd seemed like just such a disaster, so sitting down to watch it last Saturday (with a sore throat and achy limbs) was an accepted diversion.

It turns out Judge Dredd isn't so bad. It is bad. It is a disaster. But it's not the train wreck that I had hoped for. It clear that Hollywood had inserted its formula in place - take the hero, add a beautiful babe with moxie, add a wise-cracking shlub, and let a dramatic actor run amuck through the film as the villain. Judge Dredd has an interesting central conceit - what if there were citizens acting as the enforcers, judges, and juries on our streets? Put that conceit in a dire and drab post-apocalyptic city and you have a possibility for an intriguing film even when Sly Stallone is your hero.

Instead, the filmmakers go for the faux-blockbuster punch of action and comedy (however slight). Rob Schneider offers the comedic (?) relief, and Diane Lane is the beautiful babe with moxie whose loyalty shows Dredd that there's more to life than the law he had based his life on. Lane shows none of the nuance or subtlety she showed in her Oscar-nominated turn in Unfaithful, though I'll place the blame on the screenwriters and director here.

Remember in the 90's when stars would take roles as villains so they could crazy-ham-it-up and chew the scenery in ways they'd never get away with as the heroes. I'm thinking John Travolta in Broken Arrow/Face Off/Battlefield Earth. Well, take Armand Assante (?!) and give him free reign and you have the worst part of Judge Dredd. As Rico (!?), Assante had never met a scene that didn't need a bit more "pizzazz".

This even distracts from the always wooden Stallone who might actually have been the best example of casting for this film. He looks the part, he grunts the part, now if we could just make the part worth playing...And if we could make the super-Judges plot make sense at all. What exactly is the nefarious councilman's end goal? To make the best Judges ever? Not so nefarious.

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