Hey-hey-

I’m starting a new column here on DropKick.  To give us some more content for people to come back to, we’ve created a segment called the Action Addict- blog entries covering our love of action movies.  It’s no subtle thing, our love for action movies.  DropKick is all about it.  That love oozes through every pore of DropKick’s retarded face.

So, for the first Action Addict, I’m going to go over what is probably my all-time greatest guilty pleasure: the quite horrible 1995 film Judge Dredd.

Judge Dredd is seriously a piece of shit movie.  It fails on almost every level.  The action is lame.  The acting is pretty terrible.  The writing is atrocious.  Rob Schneider is in it.  You really can’t do much worse.

How did this happen?  Sly Stallone, despite how he may seem, is not an idiot.  Of the big 80’s action hero actors, he’s actually one of the more intellectual of the bunch.  Okay, maybe that’s not saying much, but he was on board Judge Dredd from the get-go, recognizing the comic book for being the brutal, satirical, brilliant thing that it is.  Not many people I know have read the Dredd comics, despite the fact that the character is perhaps the most popular comic book character in the United Kingdom where he came from.

At the very least, the movie should have been a rip-roaring and violent good time.  But… sadly, it’s not.  What happened here?

My dissection of what went wrong with Judge Dredd begins has mostly the do with when it came out.  The mid-90’s were the worst period outside of the 1950’s for action movies.  The movie industry at the time did not see the need in making big-budget, ultra-violent rated-R movies when they could make family-safe PG-13 movies instead and make twice the amount of money (never mind that most of the most profitable action movies of all time have been rated-R).  There is a logic there.  PG-13 means kids can get into it, no problem, and the 90’s were a period of people cracking down on kids sneaking into rated-R movies.  You wanted the money of those kids, you could not swing an R-rating.  Fair enough…

Except, Judge Dredd… that property… it’s goddamn violent.  It’s not violent for the sake of it, either.  It’s actually satirical and has a point.  Judge Dredd is “actually” rated R, but to quote IMDB:

From the beginning the film was intended to receive a PG-13 rating. Due to excessive violence the MPAA refused to downgrade the initial R rating despite repeated appeals by the studio and Stallone. Mostly because of schedule constraints the film could not be re-cut and was released with an R rating.

So, long story short, it’s half-assed.  It’s got an R-rating, but not because it really deserves it.

For the unfamiliar, the story of Judge Dredd takes place in the future after decades of nuclear war.  Only a few cities remain standing amidst the “cursed Earth”, an endless desert filled with mutants.  In those cities, law and order is maintained by the Judges, a group of police officers with the power to not only arrest criminals, but to try them, judge them, and (if need-be) execute them on the spot.  Judge Dredd is Mega-City 1’s most famous and most capable Judge.  He was genetically engendered to be the perfect killing machine and to be totally morally incorruptibly.

The violence in the comic speaks to the nature of the world’s brutality.  The Judges exist because humanity has gone too far.  Things have gotten so bad, we have allowed this system to be created.  It’s a statement to own judicial system, our over-crowded prisons, and the power with-which we allow our police system to function.

You take that violence away, take away the brutality, and I’m not buying the society that would create the judges.  In the movie, you never get much of a sense for Mega-City 1.  It actually looks pretty clean, pretty civil, and pretty not-bad.  There’s one bad area seen in the opening, but that’s about it.  It’s just kind of there, trying its damndest to look like Blade Runner, but not ever-once feeling like the real, lived-in city that Los Angeles feels like in Ridley Scott’s masterpiece (itself a classic action movie, in my opinion).

Another big, big problem with Judge Dredd is the humor.  The humor in the comic book comes from a very tongue-in-cheek sense of satire.  I won’t lie about it: the comic can be damn goofy sometimes.  It depends on what story-line you’re reading (the Judge Dredd comic book is over thirty years old and on-going… it’s got a lot of weird stuff in there, collected over the years), but the general tone of the comic is kind of… funny.  It takes the world totally serious, but the world is… kind of odd.  Not like, weird-odd.  There’s jokes everywhere, layers and layers of them.

But the film doesn’t get away with playing things close-to-the-hip.  The film is trying REALLY hard to be an adventure story.  Adventure stories can balance comedy and drama on the edge of a knife.  Look at Robin Hood, at how that story is at both times charming and care-free then down-right intensely dramatic.  The Judge Dredd film wants that SOOOO bad (it even has a pretty amazing score that feels like it’s right at home for an adventure film… just not the film that it is).

The comedy plays as sophmoric and childish, the kind of thing you’d see in a kid’s film.  The jokes never feel like they come from a real place, more like the filmmakers reached a point where “Damn, we need a joke here…” and just filled it in.  Then, after some lame joke, they try to follow that with a scene with some kind of false-pathos of dramatic tension.  They want their hero, Stallone’s Dredd, to be likeable, to be a human being, to be a Shakespearean tragic character.

The comic Dredd isn’t tragic.  He might have moments of tragedy, but generally… he just kicks ass.  He’s a pretty empty character… because he was genetically designed to be so.  Stallone and company are trying to pump him full of false-emotion (that Stallone isn’t really capable of reaching, at least under director Danny Cannon’s command… more on that in a minute).

You’d think that having a no-nonsense, ass-kicking main character would be easy to translate into an action film.  He’d be right at home in the r-rated-loving, brutal-as-hell 1980’s.  But being birthed into film in the 90’s is totally what killed it.

I know I could point more fingers here.  The script is bad.  It’s not terrible.  Just bad.  It actually gets a surprising amount of things right from the comic.  All the Judge Dredd-stuff is there: his talking gun, his motorcycle (except it flies now, for no reason), his outfit, his brother Rico as the main villain, the cloning storyline, even the mutants in the wasteland (who really aren’t mutants in the movie… they’re just weird guys living out in the desert who have crawled out of a bad western).

The comic has its own language of curse words (so it could be more widely published in Britain).  The movie carries through with that, using the word “DRAK” profusely.  It’s one thing to read that, but to hear it, man, it really grates on you.

That’s actually a theme within the movie.  The movie does try to do things like the comic, but it ends up failing.  The cursed Earth in the comic is supposed to be like the old west.  But in the movie, it just comes across as weird and half-assed. The lame one-liners and goofy humor is in the comic, but it just doesn’t work in the movie.

I won’t totally defend the comic, either.  Judge Dredd has its good moments and its bad, but like any comic as old and long as it is, it’s got a lot of fat that should have been cut, and there’s a plenty of crap you have to wade through to find anything truly inspiring.  But the general idea of Judge Dredd is so cool, so inventive, and so damn simple, that making a movie out of it should have been a snap.  A Judge Dredd movie would never, not in a million years be anything great.  It would never be a work of art.  There are way better comics with way more consistency to look for in that area (it’s possible to make a Preacher movie that would win Oscars… won’t ever happen, but it’s possible).

But Judge Dredd could have been a decent-to-good action movie.  Just simple action with the satire being subtle in the background would have been fine.  Instead, it’s a lame comic-book movie (that, bizarrely, opens with issues of the Judge Dredd comic flashing over the opening credits), hampered by a weak script and terrible direction.  I honestly think that about 85% of the problems with this film really come from the direction.  Just the tone of it, the forced nature of the dramatic elements, and the execution of the action scenes (most of which move with the grace of a freight train) slow the movie down to a crawl.

Then there’s Rob Schneider’s comic-relief-just-for-the-hell-of-it character, and the less that’s said about that the better.

I still enjoy the movie, but I enjoy it on the same level I enjoy watching the weird homeless guys I see on the subway.  It’s slightly deranged, more than likely mentally retarded, shabby-looking, but it’s got a sense of self that’s kind of hard for me to totally dismiss.  It’s got the damn nerve to go and piss on the subway door singing tunes from “Annie” and, damnit, I just can’t hate too much on that.  It makes me kind of laugh.  Even though it’s disgusting.

And it’s got a giant robot in it.

I think my analogy is broken.