I am the Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future

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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. 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? Judge Dredd: Towing is for a first offence, this is your fourth violation, barf breath. You're a menace. How do you plead?

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. The game does not rely on the IGOUGO system but is much more unpredictable but in common with a lot of games produced by Warlord Games, especially Strontium Dog. Every figure in the game is assigned an activation chip and these are placed in a bag to be drawn out one at a time until they have all been drawn, thus completing that turn. Rinse and repeat. You can never be sure who gets drawn first, which makes gameplay more of a challenge. I like this mechanic. Games are designed to be played with just a few figures per side. Figures are permitted two actions per turn, either two simple actions such as move or snap-fire, or one double action such as sprint or aimed fire. Play continues until one side defeats the other. It is simple, fast and fun and works very well. 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.

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.

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.Fuppie: [ interrupting] Hey, you'd better listen! I suggest you walk away and bother somebody else!