Re: Judge Dredd is back!!!
Remake or reboot? Or (shudder) sequel? That will be the question facing cinema audiences confronted by a new, big screen Judge Dredd movie in 2010 . . .
Most people (particularly in the States) will probably know Judge Dredd from the 1995 movie directed by Danny Cannon, and starring Sylvester Stallone, Diane Lane, Rob Schneider, Armand Assante and Max von Sydow. The character however has its roots in the weekly British comic book 2000 AD, where he appeared as long ago as 1977!
Basically a one-joke character when one thinks about it, Judge Dredd is a single-minded lawman of a distant future in which black-clad, fascist-like police officers preside over an overpopulated Mega-City One encompassing the U.S.’s entire East Coast. These so-called “judges” act as on-the-spot judge, jury and sometimes even executioner. “Twenty years, punk!” is probably the line of dialogue most often spouted in your average Judge Dredd comic as Dredd immediately sentences criminals he has just apprehended! “The justice system works swiftly in the future now that they've abolished all lawyers,” as Doc tells Marty in Back to the Future Part II. Indeed.
Power may corrupt, and absolute power may corrupt absolutely, but in the comics Judge Dredd is basically Dirty Harry on Overdrive, an incorruptible lawman obsessed with The Law and Justice. The official plot synopsis of the 1995 movie swallows the official line too: “In the Third Millennium a powerful and efficient hybrid of the police and judicial system has given birth to group of new guardians of the law with the power to dispense instant justice and punishment. These judges are law enforcer, jury and executioner. One of these judges, Judge Joseph Dredd is a living legend - six feet of armored justice with no outside interests besides his devotion to enforcing the law.”
Why anyone would however want to make a sequel or (bullshit Hollywood jargon coming up) “re-imagining” of Judge Dredd is a bit of a mystery. The original film disappointed at the box office and made a mere $113 million world-wide. Audiences who didn’t know the character beforehand were baffled. “Considering that the movie was adapted from comic books, the least we should expect is a juicy battle between good and evil,” Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker, “but the conflict is, in fact, a matter of fine distinctions between shades of Fascism.”
He added: “Whenever you sit back and try to enjoy the pop wizardry of the special effects, you catch sight of Dredd's epaulettes and think of Mussolini.”
Fans of the comics nitpicked it to death; complaining about how the movie departed from the comics: how Dredd never removes his helmet in the comics and how sexual relationships between judges (or anyone else for that matter) are verboten too in the comics. (No wonder they are so violent!)
Even the movie’s star thought the movie sucked. As Sylvester Stallone admitted thirteen years later in an interview with Uncut magazine:
“I loved that property when I read it, because it took a genre that I love, what you could term the 'action morality film' and made it a bit more sophisticated. It had political overtones. It showed how if we don't curb the way we run our judicial system, the police may end up running our lives. It dealt with archaic governments; it dealt with cloning and all kinds of things that could happen in the future. […] But I […] look back on Judge Dredd as a real missed opportunity. […] For me it is more about wasting such great potential there was in that idea; just think of all the opportunities there were to do interesting stuff with the Cursed Earth scenes. It didn't live up to what it could have been.”
