Judge Dredd - 1995
The true crime (heh, crime, it’s a movie about futuristic cops and…heh, never mind) of this film is that it’s not worthless.
I expected it to be worthless, to be laughable.
Instead, it’s just bad. It’s, unfortunately, not so bad that it breaks through the Suck barrier, somehow arriving back at good.
Instead it’s maybe 2 or 3 decent ideas wrapped in a gaggle of actors hamming it up when they should be playing it down, and a special effects department that should’ve known better than to say “yes” to the whole affair.
It’s not a horrible idea, future cops who serve as judge, jury and executioner. It’s an idea that’s worked for decades in comic book form.
But, as is often the case, the very things that make the book successful are diminished or taken out. Are they replaced with any ideas of quality? No. They’re replaced with Rob Schneider.
And not expertly, I might add.
So we’re left with what was, for the longest time, the standard with comic book adaptations: the nerds don’t like it because all the good nerd stuff is stripped away, and the general population doesn’t like it because it’s shitty.
