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I am the Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future

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Citizen Ma-Ma. Your crimes are multiple homicides, and the illegal manufacture and distribution of narcotics. How do you plead? [he forces Ma-Ma to inhale Slo-Mo, and she says nothing] Defense noted. [throws her out the window to her death] Fuppie: [ smiling nervously] Uh, this is getting boring, hey... So, uh, what's the tab? Come on, how much is this gonna cost me? You name the price. Both movies nailed their lead, at least. Stallone does fine when he’s actually playing Dredd in the first twenty minutes, before it goes from being a Dredd movie to a Generic Stallone Action Movie, and Urban is superb, channeling Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry (a major influence on the original comics character) to good effect. And both actors have distinct jaws, which is a vital component of playing the role… I know I said I’d do The Mask and Son of the Mask this week, but I was in more of a Dredd mood for whatever reason. We’ll dive into the Tex Avery-esque adaptation of the Dark Horse character next week.

We don’t get that with Dredd, which never manages to feel like it’s the future. There’s nothing in the production design that screams “awful future,” it mostly just screams “contemporary Los Angeles.” Worse, Peach Trees never once feels like it’s two hundred stories tall. The production design and look and feel never quite live up to what the script (or the source material) call for. Dredd and Anderson go on the run, with Kay in tow, taking care of all the thugs who try to stop them. TJ refuses to let them into the medical center. Dredd accuses him of taking sides; TJ says there are no sides, that Dredd’s already dead.Judge Dredd: And you haven't even been out of jail for 24 hours. He's habitual, Hershey. Automatic 5 year sentence. How do you plead? Fuppie: [ interrupting] Hey, you'd better listen! I suggest you walk away and bother somebody else! By 2012, Stallone’s movie was far enough in the past that another shot could be taken, this time with genre Renaissance man Karl Urban in the role. Urban kept the helmet on throughout the film, which automatically made the movie more favorable to the fans of the comic, while screenwriter Alex Garland turned to the comics for specific inspiration for his screenplay. While the cast is less famous in Dredd—only Urban and Lena Headey are what you’d call names—the casting is much stronger. For one thing, Judge Dredd‘s Mega City is populated entirely by white people, while Dredd remembers that if you shove everyone on the east coast together into one big city, you might actually encounter a person of color or twelve. And even if you’ve never heard of Rakie Ayola, she’s better at playing the chief judge than either von Sydow or Prochnow. There’s a lot of talent in this movie, and I like that they cast both Max von Sydow and Jurgen Prochnow as supervising judges, so we didn’t know which one of them was the bad guy at first. (But it had to be one of them. I mean, it’s Max von Sydow and Jurgen Prochnow, for crying out loud, neither of these two is likely to play a good guy, and certainly both of them aren’t gonna.) Joan Chen is wasted as a scientist who works with the bad guys, who’s mostly there to give Hershey someone to fight in the climax while Dredd is facing off against Rico. Speaking of Rico, Armand Assante is also wasted in a role that literally anyone who was good at overacting could play.

Unfortunately, the film was beset with difficulties, mostly the tension between Stallone and director Danny Cannon, as the former saw it as an action-comedy, while the latter viewed it as a dark satire. The film found no audience in the U.S., though it did decently overseas, not aided by the storyline breaking one of the cardinal rules of the comic strip, which is that Dredd’s face is never seen.The shuttle taking Dredd (and Fergie, who winds up sitting next to him) to prison is shot down by a family of cannibals who live in the Cursed Earth. Dredd and Fergie are captured, but they escape and kill the family—with some help from Fargo, who is fatally stabbed. Before he dies, Fargo tells Dredd about Janus, and says that Rico wasn’t just his best friend, he was his brother.

At Griffin’s urging, Rico foments more chaos, which should be enough to unseal Janus and allow Griffin to tighten the reins, as it were, with his private army of clones. Rico uses his knowledge of judge procedure and his big-ass robot to kill more than a hundred judges. This massacre, and subsequent rioting, leads the council to unseal Janus so Griffin can re-create it. If you take these two movies and average them out, you get the prefect Judge Dredd movie. Each has significant flaws, and each has elements that are perfect. Rico and Dredd face off on top of the Statue of Liberty, Dredd manages to toss Rico off to his doom, saying “Court’s adjourned.” Because of course he did. Judge Dredd: You're one of the smartest of a new breed, but you've only been on the street a year. You haven't gotten used to the isolation yet.

Players of Strontium Dog may find a few familiar ideas within the core rules of Judge Dredd. This game heavily expands on those skirmish rules, however, to reflect the urban environments of Mega-City One. The Judge Dredd rulebook contains everything you need to know about playing the game and includes rules for fighting within buildings and using vehicles. As well as a number of scenarios, there are rules for developing your chosen faction in a series of linked games.

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