Word: dredd
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...stallone stares out at the tortured futuristic landscape of Judge Dredd with a macho hauteur that seems to say, "Who's tougher than me?" And the answer is, the bosses of the major film studios. Compared with them, Stallone and his fellow summer-movie heroes--those mean-eyed, pumped-up, epigram-expectoratin' cinema studs--are prissy little honor-roll students. The real tough guys are fellows named Semel and Pollock and Roth; their battlefield is the summer calendar; they show their guts by slotting their big pictures to open in just the right week in hopes of killing the competition...
...burly, bombastic Judge Dredd, based on a popular series of British graphic novels, is best seen as a metaphor for the movie wars. As policeman, jury and executioner in the 22nd century, Joseph Dredd (Stallone) is supposed to be one potent dude, but he is manipulated and programmed by a ruling council. This Mega-City is fascism as fashion statement; Dredd's uniform has enough leather and metal to stock an S&M boutique. But he's just a soldier for hire, or a star looking for his next project. Dredd's warped mirror image is a renegade named Rico...
...superficial pleasures--like some clever production design and the splendor of a fight between two gorgeous women, Diane Lane and Joan Chen--Judge Dredd couldn't have worse timing. For one thing, it surfaces at the end of a 15-year line of dark sci-fi films; imagine Blade Runner inside a Tron video game. For another, the movie tries for the same combination of facetiousness and majesty that Batman Forever mined only two weeks before. Dredd, written by Michael De Luca, William Wisher and Steven de Souza, plays like an instant clone of the Gotham Gothic...
Rule No. 1: Remake what worked before. So The Flintstones (live-action cartoon) begets Casper; The Crow (movie version of a comic book-sorry, graphic novel) sires Judge Dredd; the Ninja Turtles frenzy of recent yore gives way to Morphin endorphins. Four Hollywood pictures last year (the megahit True Lies, as well as the less successful Intersection, Mixed Nuts and My Father, the Hero) were based on French films; so is Nine Months, a comedy about an expectant couple (Hugh Grant and Julianne Moore). The high grosses of three Michael Crichton novels-into-films in two years (Jurassic Park, Rising...
Costner surely hopes Waterworld returns him to top-star status. The film's trailer suggests a high-voltage adventure with a mythic overlay; James Earl Jones lends his patriarchal voice to images of hope and horror. Jones can also be heard promoting Judge Dredd. His voice is one of many summer-trailer talismans, along with '60s songs, computer imagery, sexual facetiousness of the sort pioneered by James Bond films, and a lot of urgent I-love-you's. In Fluke, one of the summer's few kids' movies, a boy whispers...