Originally published August 4, 1995, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1133
The streets of Mega-City One are ablaze with a citizen riot. The repressed lower class rails against a society where law and order no longer serves and protects, but oppresses and strangles.
Two peace officers—”Judges” by name and trade—are pinned down by overhead fire. They call for back-up as, high above, tattooed and snarling miscreants take aim with souped-up bazookas and shoot off more rounds.
And then the “back-up” arrives, in the form of a black-clad, helmeted engine of authority, astride chopper that makes the Batcycle look like a Big Wheel. He steps off the vehicle, surveys the situation. A microphone snaps into place and he bellows four words destined to go down in both movie and comics history:
“I am—duh law!”
Okay, he doesn’t quite say that. Just as Tony Curtis didn’t quite say, “Yonduh is da castle of my fadduh” in The Black Shield of Falworth. But that’s certainly the impression you get.
I guess for comics fans it comes down to: What have you heard in your head?
Whenever we read various characters, we “hear” them as we do so. From our own life experiences or our own mental casting session, we fill in the voices of characters in certain ways.
I don’t know about you, but when I would—from time to time—read the adventures of Judge Dredd, I always “heard” George C. Scott. His voice growling, oozing authority from every pore. And I’m sure that those of you likewise familiar with the 18-year-old British strip and the adventures of the single-minded totalitarian Dredd have also imagined your own vocal rendition of his famous catch phrase, “I am the law!”
And I’ll bet’cha that none of you ever heard Sylvester Stallone’s unique tones in your head.
“I am duh law!”
There’s no reason he shouldn’t talk that way. Mega-City One is a pumped up New York, so there’s no reason its prime law-enforcer shouldn’t be a pumped-up New Yorker. Still…
Ah well. Repartee was never Stallone’s strong suit, anyway. You don’t get Stallone for Shakespeare. (Everyone knows you get Mel Gibson.) And Dredd, on his best day, ain’t Shakespeare.
What is it, then? What is Judge Dredd, the latest entry in the comic book movie sweepstakes?
Aw, heck. It’s fun: brainless and “comic book” in all the most simplistic connotations of the word, but fun.
Actually, what’s even more fun is reading the reviews by critics who seek to brush off Judge Dredd as some sort of cheap-jack ripoff. They look at Mega-City One, the colossal supercity that encompasses New York and much of the Eastern Seaboard, and cry “Blade Runner!” Sorry. Dredd was there first.
“Like a Mad Max film!” they cry. Too bad. Dredd’s earth was scorched and cursed before Max was even mildly irritated, much less mad.
“Robocop redux!” they sniff. Tough luck. Dredd had the helmeted, heavily armed, one-note enforcer of the law territory staked out while Peter Weller was just a Buckaroo.
And the best review I’ve read is the one wherein the reviewer commented that Stallone takes the character too darn seriously. Because Stallone takes him seriously, we are told, we laugh at the character instead of laughing with the character over the absurdity of it all.
The backstory of Judge Dredd is laid out in a crawl at the beginning of the film. With the majority of the future United States a barren wasteland filled with mutated freakazoids (kind of like the comics industry when you think about it), “civilization” is confined to several Mega Cities. Law is harshly meted out by jack-booted enforcers called Judges, who capture, try and convict miscreants all within the space of seconds. There’s no appeal (especially when you’re “judged” at point blank range), no compassion, and no hope. It’s a storm-trooper, oppressive police state—and that’s just the heroes.
And the most formidable of the judges is Joe Dredd. In the comics, his perpetually beard-stubbled face is always obscured by his helmet. The “unhelmeting” of Dredd in the film was a cause of some debate for purists. It didn’t bother me much, I must admit. Dredd’s eternal anonymity, an artistic and thematic choice in the beginning, has slid into the realm of contrivance over the years.
The fact is, Stallone is a good match for Dredd. Neither of them is exactly renowned for their depth. Dredd’s credo is also his reason for being; it’s what he is, it’s all he is. His life begins and ends with the law, and he is the incarnation of law devised for humans but devoid of humanity. You can’t reason with Dredd. You can’t talk to Dredd. You can barely be in the same room with Dredd. He’s got no social life, no friends outside of the overtures from Judge Hershey (nicely played by Diane Lane) and his mentor Judge Fargo (Max von Sydow). He has no civilian clothes. We never see his home.
He is completely and utterly one-note, and stridently determined to remain that way.
In that respect—in all respects, really, aside from the great helmet debate—Judge Dredd is an utterly faithful adaptation from its source material. That makes it a fairly easy film to recommend: If you like the comics, you should like the movie. If, on the other hand, the adventures of a legally-sanctioned fanatic aren’t your cuppa, you’d be advised to save your money.
Stallone’s presence, slightly jolting at first, becomes tolerable—even enjoyable. More accessible and more believable when he’s not helmeted (although remarkably, even eerily effective in full armor), Stallone starts to grow on you. You even get used to his distinctive way of verbally caressing a line. Confronted with charges of having committed a serious felony, Stallone rages, “I’d nevuh break duh law! I am duh law!” And you find yourself nodding and snarling, “Yeah! Ya joiks! Don’t’cha know he’s duh law!?”
To hëll with Pocahontas on a giant screen in Central Park. What they should have done was throw Judge Dredd up on a screen in Yankee Stadium. The Bronx crowd would’ve gone wild for it.
The story, like the title character, is not overly complicated. Dredd is caught up in the evil power-grabbing machinations of Judge Griffin (Jurgen Prochnow), who is aided and abetted by renegade ex-Judge Rico (Armand Assante, turning in such a surly and superior performance one wishes we could see what the film would be like with him as Dredd) and a robot that looks like it could turn the Terminator into a pretzel.
Framed, convicted and stripped of his office (but not his convictions), Dredd is exiled in the company of a petty crook he had unfairly booted off to jail. Rob Schneider, who seems happy to be anywhere (even the Cursed Earth) rather than Saturday Night Live, steals the film from Stallone as Fergie, the requisite comic relief. Even better—he knows he’s stealing the film, and Stallone can only glower and let him get away with it.
Schneider’s filmic larceny is most evident in the sequence wherein, challenging Dredd’s devotion to a law so unfairly applied that Dredd himself has been victimized, Fergie disdainfully refers to Dredd as “Mister I-Am-Duh-Law” with such dead-on mimicry that the audience falls apart.
(And for those who complain about the presence of a funny sidekick, hey—it could have been worse. At least it wasn’t Walter the Wobot.)
The script by William Wisher and Steven DeSouza is so-so, with dialogue rarely moving beyond plot service, and Dredd’s repetition of “I knew you’d say that” going beyond labored. Director Danny Cannon endeavors to turn it into a sweeping epic, and doesn’t do a half-bad job. It helps if you have characters of depth when you’re embarking on such an enterprise, but by definition of a Judge Dredd movie, that’s simply not going to happen. The solid cast provides tremendous support, however.
And Nigel Phelps’ production design is simply breathtaking. The script wisely provides Fergie as a point-of-view character for the opening scenes. Consequently his return (after imprisonment) to Mega-City is superbly effective as he (and we) experience the majesty of this futuristic Megalopolis. Sets, mattes and computer shots are deftly and seamlessly combined.
In fact, the success of Mega-City is so total that you hate to be pulled out of it. It’s the film’s greatest weakness: The sequences set in the Cursed Earth seem flat and pedestrian in comparison to the Mega-City set pieces, and Stallone in a muscle shirt is—well—just Stallone.
You want to explore the nooks and crannies of Mega-City, see Cannon milk those sets and costumes for all they’re worth. Not leave them behind to concentrate on the plot because—sorry, guys—the plot ain’t the strong suit here. It’s the visuals, the look, the entire Judge Dredd environment. Fish-out-of-water stories can be riveting, but Dredd isn’t a deep enough or varied enough a character to make the theme interesting. Or at least Stallone isn’t enough of an actor to pull it off.
Yet it’s a better movie than Batman Forever, because the creators of that film condescended to the material, whereas the makers of Judge Dredd have completely bought into the character and world of Dredd. And their passion for the material shows. It’s respectful without being ponderous.
The question becomes: Why would they? For that matter, why would anyone?
In today’s society, authority figures are looked upon with fear and loathing. The government is seen as insensitive and cold, insulated from human need and frailty by layer upon layer of laws. Books of rules make the slightest undertaking (getting a zoning variance, for instance) a mammoth task. And laws devoid of flexibility (the three-strikes-you’re-out law) could once again send Jean Valjean down the tubes for stealing a loaf of bread.
We fear police brutality. We fear narrowness of vision. In short, we fear the mindset of a Judge Dredd who is so unflinchingly incapable of seeing beyond his narrow worldview, that all his experiences and misfortunes don’t have the slightest visible effect on him. Faced with incontrovertible evidence that his “law uber alles” philosophy is untenable, he doesn’t simply reject the argument. He doesn’t get that far. He doesn’t even acknowledge the argument. He is the law and the law is the law. The law is always right so he is always right. The law can never be wrong because it’s the law and the law is right. Torquemada cut more slack than Judge Dredd.
But he’s the hero, and not just a passing one. His popularity has remained consistent, even though he epitomizes everything that people fear and despise.
Could it be that he holds the same fascination that a burning factory fire does? We stare at him and shake our heads in amazement?
Is it that we keep waiting for the veneer to crack? That we keep thinking, “Sooner or later he’s going to come around, he’s going to understand that it can’t be this way. That there’s more to life than this?”
Or could it be just another case of something being acceptable in fiction because we know that it’s fiction. In the same way that thieves and crooks can be heroes because we admire their cleverness (but would, in reality, be petrified if they were prowling our neighborhood), we can admire Dredd because of the very aspects which would prompt us to fear those same traits in a real policeman. As our impatience with the judicial system grows along with our fear of criminals, some part of us wishes that someone would come in and just do the job already.
Oh, not do it to us, of course. Do it to the bad guys. The other guys. Because part of us believes that anyone who is in trouble with “duh law” did it to themselves and deserves whatever happens to them. Indeed, it may even seem that criminals have too many rights and receive too much protection, as opposed to the victims.
The danger is that at any time, through any mishap, any one of us can suddenly find ourselves in trouble. And those same protections which we find so contemptible and annoying will be exactly what we cling to because, of course, we’re being falsely accused.
But the likelihood of being faced with a real-life Judge Dredd seems slight, and so we can admire him.
Unless, of course, you’re underprivileged—or Rodney King—and I’ll bet that, in those cases, Dredd seems a lot less heroic.
But admit it. Deep down—maybe not so deep down…
Sometimes aren’t you just dying for Judge Ito to slap on a helmet, aim a Peacemaker at O.J. and rumble, “The charge is murder. How do you plead?”
“N-not guilty,” stammers O.J.
“I knew you’d say that,” rejoinders Judge Ito. “Guilty.”
End of trial. No appeal. No hope.
No TV coverage.
No books. No Kato Kaelin.
Hmmm.
Well—maybe in the sequel…
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. He just pictures Judge Dredd and Judge Hershey at a deli, and the counter guy saying, “Who ordered the hot dog with coleslaw?” and the Judge rumbling, “I am duh slaw!”)
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I think the fascination with Dredd has a lot to do with the quality of it’s stories. When written by less competent writers, Dredd stories become too much of a cliché or, worse, end up glorifying the very things the character satirices.
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Its funny, tho, to see how different audiences relate to Dredd books. In the late 70s-early 80s european cops were probably more autoritarian and vicious than american ones. And by that I mean the law largely allowed them to do whatever they wanted. Right now it seems it is the american law that seems to give more and more executive power to it’s policemen. And many people support and applaud that. Would it be too far fetched to think that an american-made Judge Dredd could be made today without a hint of satire and still be quite popular?
Can’t wait to compare and contrast this film with the upcoming remake with Karl Urban as Dredd.
“Just as Tony Curtis didn’t quite say, “Yonduh is da castle of my fadduh” in The Black Shield of Falworth”
You’re right, Peter, Tony Curtis didn’t quite say it. In fact, he didn’t say it _at all_. And for one good reason: nowhere in the movie does he come near the castle of his father. It’s one of those quotes that became legendary even though they were never said. Like “Come with me to the Casbah” (Charles Boyer was already _in_ the Casbah, and the whole plot of the movie was that he couldn’t leave the Casbah without being arrested), or “Play it again, Sam”.
Yessss, I know that. I’ve known it for a good many years, just as I also know that the line wasn’t “Me, Tarzan, you Jane.” When I said that Curtis didn’t quite say it, what I was alluding to was that he DID say a line similar to it: “This is the palace of my father, and yonder lies the Valley of the Sun.” Granted, it was in a different film (“Son of Ali Baba”) but he did say it in the New Yawk manner attributed to the misquoted line
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PAD
Someone should make a list of the greatest movie and book misconceptions.
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I was surprised when I finally watched Chariots of Fire and the iconic music was NOT played in any of the climatic race scenes. I was plesantly stunned when I saw that Saturday Night Fever involved date rape and suicide and wasn’t a feel good movie at all. And hey, Heathcliff and Cathy are major áššhølëš, not the sappy romantic heroes you’d expect.
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It’s fascinating how the way people remember movies and novels sometimes has nothing to do with the reality of the works.
Along those lines, Rene, I’ve been listening to the “Twilight” books (just have “Breaking Dawn” to go) and find myself wondering, who in their right minds would want to spend eternity with Bella? The girl is a blend of “Doctor Who’s” Susan and Peri, but clumsier and whinier! Let one of the other vamps or wolves kill her, you’ll be doing yourselves and the world a favor!
I think Edward basically is like a virgin, naive dude that marries the first girl that has consented to have sex with him, no matter how annoying she may turns out to be.
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Since Bella is the only human that isn’t affected by the vamps mental abilities, she must be the first girl that isn’t spooked/weirded out by Edward’s vampire aura or something.
Indeed, Rene. For exemple, D’Artagnan is not one of the Three Musketeers the title of the novle refers to (they are Athos, Porthos and Aramis).
The creature of Frankenstein didn’t speak in grunts (in fact, he was so well-versed in english that he used the second person singular, something I didn’t know existed until I read the novel).
James Bond was not the gadget-using womanizer the movies made him out to be (in fact, there’s even one novel in which he doesn’t bed anyone at all: Moonraker).
And Watson was not the imbecile Nigel Bruce portrayed in the Basil Rathbone movies. Even in Queen Victoria’s days, you had to be smart to become a doctor.
I still didn’t read Fleming’s James Bond or the Three Muskeeters (though I love Dumas’ The Count of Monte-Cristo).
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But yeah, Frankenstein is a vastly different book than what they’ve adapted it to. Not only is the monster erudite, but very diabolical when he puts his mind to it, and also physically agile, nothing like the innocent, prodding brute from pop culture.
And “Beam me up, Scotty” was never uttered in the original STAR TREK.
Or at any other time in Trek.
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I often put trivia questions of some sort at the end of my tests. One time this spring I gave my class three quotes — “Play it again, Sam,” “Beam me up, Scotty,” and “Luke, I am your father.” The question was to explain what all three had in common.
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Nobody got it at the time; I did have one person come in the next day and say, “My dad told me to tell you that one of your quotes was never actually said.” I told him to tell his dad that I 33% agreed.
I remember going to Shepperton Studios to cover Judge Dredd and seeing a trailer roughly the size of Cleveland. Turns out it was Stallone’s trailer and most of the crew was alternately amazed and amused by it. As I recall, the various members of his team took up virtually an entire page of the crew list, which again was a revelation to the British crew. That being said, one of my distant cousins was part of Stallone’s security detail for a number of years, so anybody who help keep the family in coin is okay by me.
I remember that it was a very so-and-so movie. Except for the first THE CROW movie I don’t remember ever liking any 1990s superhero movie.
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Not being a fan of the comic I can’t say whether it was faithful or not. But I knew enough about Dredd to know that the critics were making fools of themselves by saying it was ripping off Blade Runner and Mad Max and stuff.
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I always wondered what would happen if they made a movie of the even earlier Deathlok, THAT comic was almost supernatural in how it predated the cyberpunk movement.
What about the original TMNT film (1990)? I watched it again recently, and I gotta say, aside from a few influences from the cartoon, it was a brilliant and extremely spot-on representation of the comics, and a well written and acted movie to boot.
I don’t think I watched it…
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I am also ashamed to admit that I never read the TMNT comic, but I watched the cartoon when I was a kid.
*stares agape*
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I . . . I have . . no words . . . .
Brad Linaweaver (a writer) used to have a t-shirt showing Dredd, gun in hand, reading a huge tome entitled “The Law – v.XXXVIII – Copyright”.
The sad thing is, a lot of the design work on Judge Dredd is quite good; I just think there were two many cooks in the kitchen, which inevitably leads to a dumbing-down of the finished piece. Making this one even worse is that somebody got the idea that they should bump Rob Schneider’s role and throw in more of his funny lines. In fact, his final shot in the film where you see him being carried out had to be added well after the film was finished. If you look at the scene again, it’s all carefully shot with Schneider in medium close-up so you can’t tell that he’s not in the same shot.
“In that respect—in all respects, really, aside from the great helmet debate—Judge Dredd is an utterly faithful adaptation from its source material…the makers of Judge Dredd have completely bought into the character and world of Dredd. And their passion for the material shows. It’s respectful without being ponderous.”
I have to disagree quite strenuously, PAD. “Utterly faithful”?? I believe that the 1995 “Judge Dredd” film was blighted by its very ignorance of the source material. Talk about a wasted opportunity and a tremendous disservice to both the fans (many of whom were enraged by the liberties taken with the characters) and to the mainstream audience who’d not heard of Dredd before and held a tainted view of the character thereafter. One review of the “Judge Dredd” film described it as “Blade Runner for people with ADD,” which is about right. It totally failed to capture the comics’ mix of blackly-comic satire and dystopian sci-fi ultra-violence (“RoboCop” and “Total Recall” captured this vibe perfectly). The plot itself was a mess, with the filmmakers clumsily smashing together a bunch of classic Dredd stories (“The Return of Rico,” “The Day the Law Died,” “The Judge Child Quest”) – I’m amazed that the scriptwriters restrained themselves from chucking Judge Death into the mix. And they assigned the names of characters from the comics onto characters in the movie who bore little resemblance to them (Judge Hershey, Judge Griffin, Fergee, Judges McGruder and Silver, the Angel Gang, etc) – why didn’t the filmmakers use different names? For that matter, why was Dredd’s first name given as “Joseph” when in the comics it’s always just been “Joe”?
It’s possible that Sylvester Stallone realised that a faithful adaptation of Dredd wouldn’t appeal to the mainstream audience – after all, Dredd is an emotionally-stony, asexual, gruff, fascist bully-boy, his face mostly obscured by a helmet all the time (he’s has been given to moments of compassion and doubt in the comics, but such moments are few and far between). Stallone’s characterisation of Dredd as going on an emotional journey, removing his helmet after the first two minutes (and not wearing it in the movie thereafter), spouting inane lines of dialogue (“Court’s adjourned!”, “I’ll be the judge of that,” etc), and tolerating both a goofy comedic sidekick and a kiss from Hershey was a betrayal of the original character, and if we don’t chalk it up to Stallone’s vanity/cluelessness, we can theorise that he was trying to sanitise Dredd and make him more likeable/box-office friendly. You can make a Spider-Man movie that’s faithful to the comic-book character and appealing to audiences at the same time, because Spidey’s just that kind of guy. Dredd isn’t. I suppose if it was a choice between making the character in the movie faithful to the comics or making him more of a generic movie hero, Stallone favoured the latter – the irony being, of course, that the movie tanked at the box-office anyway. The “Judge Dredd” movie çráppëd on its source material, less faithful to the comics than to Sylvester Stallone’s blinkered, arrogant vision of how Dredd should be. Being a film director himself, Stallone’s got a reputation for overruling the assigned, credited directors of his movies, and I believe Danny Cannon (the director of “Judge Dredd”) has complained about Stallone hijacking the movie (and it shows).
A great review of JD, Mr. David.
DREDD just happens to be a film that I, well, LIKE. Quite a bit, in fact. And yes, DN, I know it monkeys around with the source material (but you never mention that Cannon was a fan of the comic…and where did you see it that Cannon complained about Stallone?), but it was a fun movie, and had a great cast chewing the scenery for all it was worth.
It is not a perfect film by any means, but darn it, whenever it’s on television I watch it and enjoy it.
I don’t know how good the upcoming DREDD will be…but it wouldn’t surprise me at all to hear moans of “The Stallone film was better!” Heck, that’s sort of what happened when the miniseries of DUNE premiered a few years ago–you had moans and groans about how great the 1984 David Lynch film was, even though that film was savaged by the critics. One of the few positive reviews was written by Harlan Ellison.
On the subject of Dredd’s voice: There have been a couple of different audio adaptations of Dredd in Britain. The line by Big Finish (best known for their Doctor Who audio line) is excellent (although it amuses me that they stretched things to get an English Judge into the story) and Dredd’s voice fits. (There’s one story, incidentally, in which every single voice is done by the same actor–it’s impressive.)
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There were also a few adaptations of classic Dredd stories done as newspaper giveaways. These weren’t bad, but Dredd’s voice…well, I know what they were going for. New York accent, raspy voice–makes sense as the image they’d want to project.
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Unfortunately, Dredd wound up sounding way too much like a specific raspy-voice New Yorker: Harvey Fierstein. The cognitive dissonance got to be too much (I kept picturing Dredd as rotund and bearded) and I didn’t wind up finishing it.