I am the Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future

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The shuttle taking Dredd (and Fergie, who winds up sitting next to him) to prison is shot down by a family of cannibals who live in the Cursed Earth. Dredd and Fergie are captured, but they escape and kill the family—with some help from Fargo, who is fatally stabbed. Before he dies, Fargo tells Dredd about Janus, and says that Rico wasn’t just his best friend, he was his brother. Judge Dredd: You're one of the smartest of a new breed, but you've only been on the street a year. You haven't gotten used to the isolation yet. 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.

Judge Dredd: [ pulling Fergie, by the mouth, out of the service robot he's been hiding in and slamming him against a wall] Mega City code 7592: Willful sabotage of a public droid. That's 6 months, citizen. Let's see your Unicard. 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. 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. 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).Dredd is riding his bike through Mega City, chasing a van that is obviously being driven by someone under the influence. The occupants are taking Slo-Mo, a new narcotic on the streets that makes time go by very slowly. (Why this would appeal to junkies, most of whom want to escape from misery, is an exercise for the viewer, unless there’s a concomitant high, though that’s not at all clear from what we see of the drug.) 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.

Judge Dredd: Towing is for a first offence, this is your fourth violation, barf breath. You're a menace. How do you plead? Fuppie: [ interrupting] Hey, you'd better listen! I suggest you walk away and bother somebody else! 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.

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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. The song is about the 2000 AD character Judge Dredd and includes references to many of the character's storylines up until 1987. 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] I know I said I’d do The Mask and Son of the Mask this week, but I was in more of a Dredd mood for whatever reason. We’ll dive into the Tex Avery-esque adaptation of the Dark Horse character next week.

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. 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. The dystopian future world of Judge Dredd is the most popular feature to come from 2000 A.D., and in 1990 it was spun off into Judge Dredd Megazine, which is still being published today. And twice, Dredd has been adapted into a feature film. 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.

Vartis Hammond is a reporter who is on the verge of exposing corruption among the judges. He and his boss are killed by a judge wearing Dredd’s badge and using Dredd’s gun. (Judges’ weapons have biometrics that enable them only to be used by the judge it’s issued to.) 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.