Sylvester Stallone removing his helmet fifteen minutes into Judge Dredd isn't the end of the world. Danny Cannon's film is canny enough to play this moment as a reveal - not only a formal introduction to the feature actor, it's also a first for the character, representing (a few gag panels aside) a massive divergence from the 2000 AD source material. As Stallone raises the futuristic sallet, the camera snakes around from behind his head, slowly examining the fade of his haircut before coming to rest on the star's face. The military drumming of Alan Silvestri's wonderfully pompous score underlines the action by striking to attention.
It helps that Stallone looks, more or less, like how you'd imagine the veteran Judge would - the actor not very far off from the snarling mug Simon Bisley eventually painted over when illustrating 1991's Batman/Judge Dredd: Judgment on Gotham crossover comic. Structurally, the film is front-loaded. The detail William Wisher Jr and Steven E de Souza's screenplay plunders from the character's mega-history much more evident in this, relatively serious, first act. As the film goes on though, the stress marks start to show. This is less an attempt to accurately portray John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra's deathless creation and more about using a dynamic, comic, property as the motor for an American action film.
Although originally an ironic (now prescient) look at an America warped by fascism, Judge Dredd is decoded as European here. The future-shocked power structure examined in dynastic, almost courtly, terms. Dredd - the city's best knight - is the monastic Lancelot, a fanatic who fights to honour the principles of his King, in this instance Max von Sydow's Chief Justice Fargo. These feudal terms are especially useful because Judge Dredd's ruling class do not recognise that they are perpetuating a dictatorship. They're wrapped up in their own legend. Round table meetings are sprinkled with a hypocritical hand-wringing utterly at odds with the summary executions we have just witnessed Dredd perform.
Similarly, Judges found to be breaking the law are allowed their day in court, as well as hand-selected legal representation, a privilege that towers over the instant, curb-side justice Mega City One's civilian population are subjected to. This dichotomy, not to mention the specific situation that puts Dredd in the bad books, has a root in the original comics. 1978-79's The Day The Law Died depicted Dredd, framed for murder by a robot doppelganger, appearing before the city's highest ranking Judges to decide his fate. Naturally, the sequence appearing in 2000 AD is designed to give its young readers another angle on power and the pantomimes it performs to appear egalitarian.
This is Judge Dredd: The Movie in a nutshell. It recognises Dredd and his environment as singular, a fresh recalibration of dour, politically engaged, 70s science-fiction and the muscle films that Stallone helped pioneer. Here, for a mid-90s blockbuster, the concept's alienness needs dialling back, so we're served a police state that has been massaged for mass consumption, complete with false, inconsistent, ethics and Rob Schneider's comedy capering. The Dredd character and his stories are picked apart, transformed into a greatest hits package that reaches across decades of work for grist - never mind if these parts actually fit together. The Cursed Earth is demoted from a radioactive hell to a lawless bad-lands; the stranglehold of a demented Chief Judge reduced to a coup that never really reverberates beyond the Hall of Justice; The Judge Child Quest's Angel Gang, while retaining their violent incompetence, are changed into God-bothering cannibals.
It's a comparatively minor Dredd story, Tale of the Dead Man, that receives the most astute disassembly in Cannon's film. In Wagner, Will Simpson and Jeff Anderson's 1990 story Dredd is the flagging veteran who refuses to declare his brainwashed clone bother Kraken fit for active duty. When faced with push-back, Dredd resigns then leaves the city to wander the wasteland. De Souza and Wisher Jr's screenplay takes this basic idea - the sins of the knockoff - and shifts the pieces around. Dredd's role goes to Chief Justice Fargo, the man who provided the genetic blueprint for Dredd and a character usually depicted as long dead before Dredd reaches adulthood. Fargo is used here to communicate the past and weight of the Dredd mythos. He's both a proxy and the elderly master who allows Stallone's thick, middle-aged, Dredd to register as comparatively youthful.
Sydow's Fargo verbalises a personal history specific to the comic Dredd, the youthful indoctrination and the (now) creeping doubts. Stallone's Dredd is therefore re-positioned into the role of a usurper - the faulty replication who pollutes then undermines his superior's career. Like Kraken, Stallone's Dredd is so devoted to appearing rigid in the face of an unfair judgement that he robotically complies with the consequences, allowing himself to be shipped off to the film's Aspen penal colony. Notably, comic Dredd's sense of personal justice cannot be imposed upon. In The Day The Law Died, when Judge Cal attempted to have Dredd shipped off to a similar holding, the imprisoned Judge revolted, lashing his guard with the chains that held him before hijacking the spaceship that was supposed to carry him off to a prison at the other end of the solar system.
Rico, Dredd's clone brother, is similarly designed as an approximation of extant stories rather than an attempt to adapt the character on the page. Pat Mills and Mike McMahon's Rico is a former Judge sentenced to hard labour on one of Saturn's moons after he is discovered running a protection racket. Rather than waste money outfitting this perp with an expensive atmosphere suit, comic Rico was physically modified - a mechanical breathing apparatus stitched into his face; his mouth, nose and ears sewn up. Armand Assante's take suffers no such augmentation, the character's mechanical aspect exported to an ABC Warrior bodyguard, a wonderful, hydraulic, brute imported from an otherwise unconnected 2000 AD and Starlord strip. Like his brother, this Rico is a muddle of contradictory ideas, at times even muttering with the same sweeping, genocidal, rhetoric as the dimension-hopping zombie (and frequent Dredd foe) Judge Death.
Later in the film Rico is heard claiming to be a revolutionary, Dredd seemingly agreeing with this reading by correcting that Rico actually started a riot, an act that recalls the Democracy storylines that ran in 2000 AD during the late 80s and early 90s. Neither framing really goes anywhere. Assante's Rico is stuck between Wisher and de Souza's drafts, functioning as a target and very little else. Cannon's Judge Dredd is best described then as a visual treat, a special effects showcase that dutifully follows the blueprint drawn up by Ezquerra, McMahon, Brian Bolland, Ron Smith, Colin MacNeil and the dozens of other incredible artists who have shaped Dredd's world. Structurally though, the film becomes more ungainly as it blusters on - Schneider's role ballooning from a comedy sidekick to a full-on Greek chorus, commenting on and deconstructing events even as they unfold.
The film slips away from Cannon and the art department's obviously sincere intentions, devolving into knockabout, meretricious, violence with Stallone the lunkheaded performer, rather than Judge Dredd the character, as the film's motor. So, on a quest to clear his name, this Dredd wastes umpteen fellow Judges, detonates several housing blocks (presumably full of innocent families) and, maybe most bizarrely, fails to follow the logic of his own, artificial, creation. When confronted with Rico's undercooked facsimiles, Dredd spits the invective 'things' at his newborn brothers and sisters; cocking his massive shotgun as their pained bodies slither out of their chrome pupa. These are the moments that really damage the film, flying in the face of any connection or vulnerability that Dredd's previous disrobing might otherwise prickle. Despite all this, it's difficult to argue with the film's opening scenes - James Earl Jones' booming voice getting us up to speed on the film's grim backstory then a sequence featuring The Statue of Liberty, dwarfed here by obnoxious, holographic, adverts.
Stallone's performance is at its best in these early moments too. His introduction, in the midst of a shoot-out between two adjacent skyscrapers, doesn't just give us our first look at the Judge's golden armour - credited to Gianni Versace - it allows the film to briefly position the character in the same absurd, ironic, terms as the original comic. Unshakeable under heavy gunfire, this Dredd is so assured he seems to exist slightly out of phase with reality. He's a multi-dimensional being who imposes his own bizarre will on his environment. An apartment block full of assault rifle-toting squatters? A mere trifle for this lawman. In scenes that mix the first published Dredd strip Judge Whitey and Wagner, Mills and Ezquerra's rejected Bank Raid (deemed too violent in 1977, this original introduction was eventually cleaned up and published in Judge Dredd Annual 1981), Dredd calmly blasts the lot, making excellent use of his Lawgiver pistol's ludicrously specific ammunition settings.
