CINEMA: Jonathan Romney
SINCE his creation in 1977, the monolithic future lawman Judge Dredd has been the mainstay of the weekly British comic 2000 AD — and if ever a title was approaching its sell-by date, it’s that one. 2000 AD already sounds as quaint and olde-worlde a title as George Orwell’s 1984 did by the mid-1970s. Predictive sci-fi does have a way of dating, and that’s the problem with the long-awaited movie version of Judge
On screen, the comic’s monster metropolis Mega City One already looks like a museum-display composite seen too many times before. Like nearly every sci-fi city dystopia seen over the past 20 years, it’s a version of New York gone festeringly wrong. The cramped, murky jungle of Blade Runner set the template, and every year its variants get taller, more rambling and more cluttered, as computer-generated imagery takes further leaps ahead.
Judge Dredd gives it to us bigger and more labyrinthine than ever. But with its towers and abysses, its virtual billboards, its airborne cars whizzing through scrap- iron gullies, it’s still the same old megalopolis.
The Judge Dredd strip, littered with pop culture references and Spitting Image-style political jibes, has a genuinely subversive heart, at once glorifying and ridiculing the superhero image. Judge Dredd is more monstrous than heroic, a grim slab who dispenses with the finer virtues of head and heart, playing it by the book. The one decent joke here is when he is sent off to teach an ethics course.
This epic version of the strip is directed by Danny Cannon, the Brit responsible for the glossy but vacant The Young Americans. The first casualty is the strip’s engaging sleaziness. Part of the pleasure of 2000 AD is the scrappiness of the execution — it’s exactly the sort of comic you’d expect to leave ink on your hands.
The film could have been pitched accordingly as cruel burlesque, as a series of sketches, with Dredd taking the execution of justice a horrifying step further each time. Instead, it’s laden with a conventional good- versus-evil narrative, in which Dredd’s evil brother Rico (Armand Assante) returns from prison with world domination in mind.
There’s an evil judge (JUrgen Prochnow) and an impossibly good one (noble old Max von Sydow); there’s comic Rob Schneider as Dredd’s dweeb sidekick, there’s a bunch of sticky-fleshed clones, apparently there only as an excuse for the line “Send in the clones!”; and there’s Joan Chen, cooling her heels as she’s been doing ever since Twin Peaks.
Cannon too often wants to strike us with awe when he could be administering snappier thrusts. The film’s weakest moment is when Von Sydow resigns his post and does what all retiring judges must — walk out into the sandy wilderness. Rather than feel terror and pathos, we start raising objections. Didn’t they give him time to go home and pack? What about a gold watch? Don’t judges have a pension scheme?
The absence of the comic’s satirical finesse has led some critics to see the film’s glorification of Dredd’s one-man law as verging on fascistic. But the worst problem is simply inconsistency. No one’s really thought out what kind of world this is and what law runs it. Is the law itself a tyranny, or are there simply good and bad judges? Is Dredd, observing the letter of the law, good, bad or just a bludgeoning
It doesn’t help that Stallone tries to give Dredd the tender heart of the wounded, misguided regular guy but can’t help playing the armour-plated hero like an animated vending machine. A comic-book character can be one-dimensional, but when he has only one limp one- liner to his name (his single gag, repeated to every felon, is “I knew you’d say that”), he might as well pack up and leave the raffishness to Schwarzenegger, who’s bigger, faster and funnier.
Every paid-up post-modernist knows that all futures are simply cobbled-together bits of the greatest hits of the past, so it’s only consistent that Judge Dredd should rehash Blade Runner, Terminator, RoboCop and even Stallone’s own Demolition Man. But this is so much a composite of familiar images that it’s practically Now That’s What I Call a Dystopia Vol 27.
It suggests that the sci-fi movie had better reinvent itself, and maybe the way to do that is to go back to basics. In fact, the one entertaining thing here is an old-fashioned, rusty robot. They complain that the future’s not what it used to be. The trouble is that, as Judge Dredd shows, it is — and ever more so.