Judge Dredd
I AM THE LAAAAAAAW! Jon fought the law, and the law lost. I would believe if Diane Lane was pranked into thinking this would be a serious film. One of the weirdest source materials to adapt into a children’s film.
It’s not that Stallone is the wrong guy for the part, Rob Schneider as the comic relief is just too much, Armand Assante is less over the top than the hero, and this is just a blatant Blade Runner ripoff, but during the daytime, for kids. It’s that they did the same thing, almost beat for beat, in Demolition Man. This is just embarrassing.
The women are absolutely sidelined: Diane Lane has some scenes, but Joan Chen stands around with a gun in hand for a good five minutes on the background, doing nothing. She’s just there to be harassed by the bad guy.
The plot is almost perfunctory. Dredd is a hardass by-the-book cop, her colleague is some bleeding heart liberal, by the end our hero has gone softer, but she doesn’t change at all! The elites have ways to clone people in 8 hours, but don’t use this for infinite slave labour, it’s tucked away, waiting for the bad guy to trick the Chief Justice into cloning himself.
Watch Dredd if you want a proper adaptation, and Demolition Man if it’s Saturday afternoon.
Weep for this possible past:
The Coen Brothers were offered the director’s chair but turned it down
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.