I am the Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future

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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. 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. 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.

However, for all that Judge Dredd looks like the comic, the story is a disaster. While the characters are nominally from the comics, they bear only a passing resemblance to them. The three writers of Judge Dredd took the basic setting for Dredd and slapped a bog-standard action-movie plot on top of it. The whole point of this particular future is that judgment is faceless and emotionless. That’s why we never see the judges’ faces. They’re the embodiment of the law. Having Dredd take off his helmet, and keep it off for 85% of the movie is just a disaster. And yes, it’s a movie, and yes, Stallone’s face is famous, but he was doing just fine at the beginning of the movie. 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.

Dredd is put on trial, with Hershey defending him. The chief justice, Fargo, who is Dredd’s mentor, doesn’t want to believe that Dredd would commit homicide, but the evidence is overwhelming. However, when a judge retires, he goes on “the long walk”—bringing justice to the Cursed Earth outside the city until he or she dies. Traditionally, a judge’s last wish before retiring is always followed, and Fargo decides to retire with his last wish is for Dredd to be judged leniently. Maybe some day we’ll get the perfect Judge Dredd movie that combines the production values of Judge Dredd with the script sensibilities of Dredd. These two movies’ failures don’t bode well, but then the comic book character’s still going strong after four decades, so who knows what’ll happen in another decade or two? 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. 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. And then there’s Rob Schneider. Sheesh. Though he does do a good Stallone impersonation at one point, which is also the only actual laugh the character gets.

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.Central reports a triple homicide in Peach Trees, a two-hundred-story apartment complex. The three bodies were thrown from the two-hundredth floor after being flensed. They were also high on Slo-Mo when they were tossed, so they got to really savor the experience of falling to their doom.

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. I Am the Law" is a single by thrash metal band Anthrax, from the album, Among the Living. It is one of Anthrax's most famous songs, appearing on their best-of albums: Return of the Killer A's, Madhouse: The Very Best of Anthrax and Anthrology: No Hit Wonders (1985–1991). 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] Both Rico and Dredd were clones, created from genetic material from the finest of the judges’ council. The project, codenamed Janus, was abandoned and sealed after Rico went binky-bonkers. Now, though, Griffin wants to revive Janus so he can have perfect judges. He freed Rico from his secret imprisonment, had him impersonate Dredd to kill Hammond (Rico and Dredd have the same DNA), and for shits and giggles, he also got his hands on an old robot enforcer.

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Dredd takes down the van, which kills two of the occupants. He chases the third into a food court where he stops the third despite his having taken a hostage. However, all of this was part of a cunning plan. The new chief justice, Griffin—the one who recommended that Fargo retire to save Dredd—set this whole thing in motion. Years ago, a judge named Rico went a bit crazy and killed innocents. The incident was covered up and Rico was imprisoned in secret, all records of him wiped from the central computer. 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. The song is about the 2000 AD character Judge Dredd and includes references to many of the character's storylines up until 1987.

TJ, the doctor who runs the medical center in Peach Trees, explains to Dredd and Anderson that an ex-hooker named Madeline Madrigal, a.k.a. Ma-Ma, runs all the gangs in Peach Trees, having taken over the four rival gangs that had been running things in the complex. TJ tells them where one of the drug dens is, and the judges raid it. Everyone is killed except for Kay, whom Anderson is fairly certain is the one who killed the three guys. Fairly certain isn’t enough, so Dredd plans to take him in for interrogation. 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…

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However, the 2012 movie also failed to find an audience in theatres, though it has performed better on home video platforms, and there are rumblings of a sequel. Judge Dredd first started appearing in the British comics magazine 2000 A.D. in 1977. That magazine has, over the years, featured work by such British superstar comics creators as Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Brian Bolland, Grant Morrison, and Pat Mills and John Wagner. At Mills’s urging (he was editor at the time), Wagner created Dredd, along with artist Carlos Ezquerra, who designed his iconic outfit.