Judge Dredd (1995)

Judge not, lest ye be judged for THIS piece of crap.

Before we begin, let me make a full disclosure. I know one of the screenwriters, William Wisher, Jr. Well, I mean I’ve met him. Actually, he was cast in the lead role of my first play, but backed out at the last minute when he got a TV pilot about the phone company. (Remember The Phone Company? That actually used to be a thing—a big thing!—but now it just sounds like a children’s educational television show that aired on PBS in the 1970s, right after The Electric Company.) Anyway, I have no lingering resentment, and swear I remained impartial while reviewing his stupid film.

Judge Dredd (1995)
Directed by Danny Cannon
Written by Michael De Luca (story) William Wisher, Jr., Steven E. De Souza

Our movie starts with the usual crawl, explaining the usual sci-fi premise, narrated by the usual James Earl Jones. Climate’s gone bad. Nation’s in chaos. People crowded into a mega-city (called Mega City), ruled by all-powerful Judges who are a combination of Police, Jury, and Executioner. Basically, we’re about to be hand-dipped in Samuel Alito’s most lubricious wet dream, so you might want to do what people at a Gallagher concert do, and huddle under a big plastic poncho.

Mega City is a dark, rainy, densely packed metropolis full of gun-toting psychopaths and a huge, riot-prone underclass. The filmmakers have taken great pains to vividly depict a bleak and joyless dystopia, so I think we can all agree that adding Rob Schneider to the scene is just redundant. Nevertheless, up he pops, playing the sort of part that Peter Lorre would have rejected as “too weasely.”

Into the midst of this violent unrest strides Sylvester Stallone as Judge Dredd. He cuts an imposing figure with his aluminum shin-guards, but he seems to be under the false impression that he’s acting in a Pinter play, since he peppers his dialogue with huge, arbitrary pauses. “I am...the Law. Drop...your weapons! The [unintelligible]...are under...arrest! This is...your final...warning!”

I don’t know. It worked for Alan Bates and Donald Pleasance in The Caretaker, but it seems less effective coming from a guy in a Teflon codpiece.

As part of his magisterial regalia, Judge Dredd has an extraordinarily high-tech, multi-function handgun (rapid fire, armor-piercing, grenade-launching, etc.) that is voice activated. And perhaps the only part of the filmmaker’s carefully designed, fully imagined future world that I don’t believe is that the gun understands a frigging word Stallone is saying.

Anyway, he uses it to kill a bunch of people, and then he finds Rob cowering inside a noodle vending machine, and sentences him to five years for destruction of public property and attempted comic relief.

Later, at the Council of Judges meeting, we learn that Mega City is descending into anarchy. Judge Jurgen Prochnow wants to deal with violence by expanding executions to lesser crimes, like failing a smog check, or tearing the tag off your mattress. But he’s thwarted by Chief Justice Max von Sydow, who believes in a kinder, gentler form of fascism.

Meanwhile, at the Aspen Penal Colony, Armand Assante is in solitary confinement. The warden enters the cell to deliver a package and some exposition: Armand was once a Judge, before he started killing even more indiscriminately than Stallone. But he’s not only more ruthless, he’s actually harder to understand than Stallone is, sounding like a combination of Mushmouth from “Fat Albert” and Jodie Foster from Nell. Anyway, Jurgen sends Armand a gun hidden in a Rubik’s Cube, and he escapes.

Meanwhile, pert, idealistic young summary executioner Diane Lane tries to befriend Judge Dredd, who seems terribly alone. Turns out that Dredd did have a friend once, but he had to execute him when he violated alternate side of the street parking regulations.

Armand kills a reporter, and frames Judge Dredd for the crime. It seems he and Stallone are actually brothers, and are both the product of a secret eugenics program called Janus. Twenty years ago, the Council attempted to genetically engineer a breed of super-Judges, but—in a shocking twist for a sci-fi film—it went horribly wrong, and the results were Armand, Stallone, and Judge Judy.

Stallone is convicted of the reporter’s murder, and sentenced to life in the Aspen Penal Colony. His mentor, Max von Sydow, is devastated by the verdict. Combined with the presence of Jurgen, Max suffers a mental breakdown, and apparently thinks he’s back on the set of Dune, since he dons his old Fremen stillsuit and wanders out into the wasteland with a big flashlight to look for night crawlers and giant sandworms.

Meanwhile, Stallone’s cruel and unusual punishment begins on the prison shuttle, when he’s seated next to Rob Schneider. The pain is cut relatively short when they fly over Texas, and the descendants of the Leatherface family shoot down the shuttle with a surface-to-air missile.

They hang Stallone and Schneider like a couple of honey cured hams, and invite Max over for a Texas-style cannibal barbecue. But Max had a snack earlier, and really just stopped by to drop off some more exposition and get killed. Seems that Jurgen framed Dredd so he could revive the Janus project and make an army of Stallones and rule the Earth! (Or at least Planet Hollywood.) Stallone snaps into action, and immediately infiltrates Mega City to foil Jurgen’s plan. Instead, Jurgen kills all the other members of the Council, and promptly frames Dredd for that.

Meanwhile, Armand uses the Janus system to reproduce himself, creating an army of psychopathic judges, and exponentially increasing the number of hammy performances he can give in any fiscal year. Dredd and Diane rush to the Janus lab to stop his mad scheme, and promptly fail. This allows Stallone and Armand to stand face-to-face, twist their mouths up, and bellow incomprehensibly at each other in some sort of chest-pounding contest of simian diction. It’s like if Jane Goodall directed The Parent Trap.

Eventually, Stallone’s greater experience as a mush-mouthed homunculus pays off, and he wins. In desperation, Armand pulls the gestating clones from their cryo-chambers to tear Stallone limb from limb. But he hatches them prematurely, and the clones are underdone, and in some cases, still frozen in the middle. So Stallone throws Armand off the Statue of Liberty.

In the end, Jurgen’s brutal fascism is discredited, and Stallone’s bleeding heart fascism is triumphant.

We leave you now with a heroic shot of Dredd silhouetted against a golden sunset and the monumental, Albert Speer-like architecture of Mega City, as director Leni Reifenstahl is brought in to wrap up the movie.

In many post-apocalyptic films, the key to survival lies in cultivating a positive relationship with the rump authorities, who often wield powers unchecked by civil liberties. There is perhaps no better illustration of this than in Judge Dredd, where Stallone’s character combines the normally discrete powers of law enforcement and the judiciary, leading the viewer to conclude that the dominant social caste has evolved from the Sheriff in Macon County Line. Therefore, to help you prepare for this particular future, we have compiled a few quick tips: Stock up on plugs of Red Man chewing tobacco, pork rinds, and Yvette Mimeaux videos. Also, you might want to buy a gun and practice talking to it with your mouth full of ball bearings, or Malt-O-Meal. Finally, declare your allegiance to the duly established local authorities by displaying an appropriate bumper sticker. We suggest “Support Your Local Police, or They’ll Kill You.”

We believe that following these few simple steps will help to prepare you for the impending fascist Zeitgeist (or at least the version depicted in this film, which might best be termed Fascism Lite—only one-third the extrajudicial killings of our regular fascism, but with all the leather fetishism you’ve come to expect).