Judge Dredd, the legendary British comic about life in Mega-City One, has twice been adapted for the movies.
In 2012, Pete Travis and Alex Garland teamed up to give us Dredd, a film that starred Karl Urban as Joseph Dredd, the famous helmeted cop who is tasked to serve as judge, jury, and executioner in Mega-City One. Dredd was acclaimed for being an exciting action film that stayed true to the comic’s satiric subtext. Karl Urban was praised for bringing Dredd to life even while wearing the judge’s signature helmet and armor. Of course, another reason Dredd was acclaimed was because it was totally different from the first attempt to turn Judge Dredd into a movie.
In 1995, Sylvester Stallone played the title character in Judge Dredd. “I am the law!” Stallone shouts throughout the film, even while he’s being set up to take the fall for a murder that he did not commit. Working with talkative criminal Fergie (Rob Schneider) and Judge Hershey (Diane Lane), Dredd tries to stop his brother, Rico (Armand Assante), from destroying Mega-City One. Max von Sydow and Jürgen Prochnow appear as other judges, and James Earl Jones provides the opening narration, telling us how society collapsed and a world patrolled by judges arose in its place.
As a film, Judge Dredd is typical of many of the now-forgotten comic book adaptations of the ’90s. Tim Burton’s Batman had made comic book films viable, but they still weren’t taken seriously as anything other than a way to get teenage boys to part with their money. It’s obvious that a lot of time and money went into duplicating the look of the Judge Dredd comic, but far less time was spent on what actually made the comic so successful in the first place. Mega-City One looks great and so does Dredd’s armor. However, Dredd loses both his armor and his trademark helmet early on because he’s being played by Sylvester Stallone, and why would you spend all that money on a star just to hide his face? Unfortunately, once Stallone removes the helmet, the character goes from being Judge Joseph Dredd to just being another generic Stallone action hero. And while the film does feature plenty of humor, it’s self-conscious slapstick as opposed to the sharp satire that distinguished the comic. The performances become more and more cartoonish as the movie plays on. Armand Assante ends up making Schwarzenegger’s turn in Batman & Robin look subtle by comparison.
Director Danny Cannon was reportedly a fan of the original comic, and his original vision for Judge Dredd stuck closer to the source material. However, Sylvester Stallone wanted the film to be more of an action comedy in the style of his previous hit, Demolition Man. (Stallone even brought Rob Schneider over from the previous film.) Cannon’s vision was for a violent, R-rated movie. (The first cut was hit with an NC-17.) Stallone and the studio wanted a PG-13 film, and the end result is a film that does not seem to know what it wants to say or who it was made for. It has enough gunfire and explosions that it’s not a terrible action film, but as an adaptation of Judge Dredd, it’s the pits.
Fortunately, years later, Dredd would come along and set things right.
