Upsetting Day: Judge Dredd Accidentally(?) Endorses Fascism

Judge Dredd is a film about many things. It is a cautionary tale of excess and hubris. It’s an efficient time capsule of the best and worst impulses of entertainment in the year 1995, like Pauly Shore locked in a casket full of CD singles of the Friends theme song and Batman Forever Happy Meal toys. It is a film about an unstoppable barrage of Sylvester Stallone’s most terrible ideas, let loose unfiltered upon the world like an oil spill. It is also a film about Armand Assante’s robot.

But mostly, Judge Dredd is a film about how someone can misunderstand the moral of a story so badly that they accidentally turn it into a manifesto about the advantages of living in a fascist police state in the retelling. It’s like someone cornering you at the gym to poorly summarize a movie based on the snippet they heard from an autoplay preview while searching Netflix for illegal pornography. You’re pretty sure they’re telling it wrong, and that their heart was never in the right place to begin with. It’s like someone making a superhero movie about Ralph Fiennes' character in Schindler’s List.

For those of you not in “the know,” Judge Dredd is based on a satirical British comic set in a post apocalyptic hellscape where cops rule the world, but in a cool way, like all their equipment was designed by a nine-year-old who won a sweepstakes. The cops, called Judges, dispense absolute justice on the street, skipping due process entirely for the sake of efficiency. I’ve never met Stallone in person but we have hung out several times in various dreams I’ve had over the years, so I feel that I am qualified to speak for him. And after watching Judge Dredd for the 34th time, “it’s a movie about dope-as-hell cops in the future” is the primary impression Stallone had after reading the comics, a phrase here meaning “a Planet Hollywood manager read a few pages aloud to him while he stared at a drawing of Judge Dredd and absolutely demolished a baked potato.”

You may be too young to remember, and I suppose that’s ok as long as you never say it to my face, but pop culture in the 1980s became convinced that due process was a ridiculous pain in the ass. According to just about every movie and TV show of the decade, lousy criminals were getting preferential treatment over the men and women in blue trying to keep our streets safe because of some egghead bullshit called “the Constitution,” which dictates you must waste time “finding proof” and “respecting inalienable rights” instead of just blowing them all away. Stallone – as well as his fellow Street Sharks Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, and, uh, Charles Bronson – turned this mentality into a lucrative new subgenre of action movie, unofficially called The Police Are Fucking Awesome and Should Be Allowed to Kill Everyone. Judge Dredd the comic is a satire of that subgenre, although you’d never guess it by watching Stallone’s movie adaptation.

Stallone isn’t a dumb guy (except when it comes to deranged conspiracy theories about the government), and it’s clear in interviews that he understood the satirical tone of the source material. But after watching his version of the character play out on screen, it’s even more loudly, savagely clear that he did not give one ounce of shit about that. Stallone clenched that Judge Dredd comic in his considerable fists (or, again, more accurately had an assistant hold it up in front of him while his meaty fingers tore into a succulent spud) and said, “Oh hey, it’s like Cobra but in the future. My buddy Rob Schneider can play the geek and my brother Frank can write a song. Throw a broad in there too and bing bang boom, we got a movie. Hey, go in the back and see if we have more bacon bits.” Please note that I have yet to discover a Frank Stallone ballad about Judge Dredd but I am no less convinced that one exists, somewhere.

The film opens with a montage of various comic book covers bearing Dredd’s bulbous helmet and sneering chin, like history’s most violent cricket, before slowly zooming in on a few pages from an issue as an unseen hand quickly flips through them. This is presumably meant to represent the entirety of Stallone’s research process. It serves the additional function of letting us all know ahead of time that this whole thing was some funny book’s idea, so if it sucks, don’t come crying to Stallone.

“Ok, I’ve seen enough nerd papers, let’s go find someone to give me $40 million.”

- Sylvester Stallone, probably.

James Earl Jones makes a vocal cameo to bring us all up to speed on the blasted future landscape that required the formation of a brutally authoritarian regime in which cops are both church and state, and then we’re introduced to Fergee, a man whom the movie insists just returned home from future jail but who is clearly Rob Schneider in the year 1994. He reacts to his arrival in Mega City 1 as though he’s just stepped out of a time machine, rather than someone who has lived in this world his entire life. Fergee is the comic relief, but his witty remarks are limited to things a fussy cartoon librarian would say while trapped in a bounce castle with a team of competitive eaters. He also begins and ends every sentence by screaming Dredd’s name, and never misses an opportunity to tell Dredd to watch out. Don’t worry, he’s in every scene of the film.

Among its many questionable beliefs, Judge Dredd is convinced that everything Rob Schneider does is hilarious, despite the fact that his brand of Comedy™ in this film is essentially him having a subtly different but equally distressing orgasm every time he speaks. A barrage of confused ejaculate is blasting into his pants every time he opens his mouth, and he is reacting accordingly. His performance makes much more sense when you frame it in this fashion.

Beyond the perpetual hose fest taking place within Rob Schneider’s future pants, the single greatest element of Judge Dredd is how oblivious it is to its own cheerful fascism. The first thing we see Judge Dredd do is blast his way through a “block war,” which is another way of saying “a bunch of people rioting against the government.” James Earl Jones has already explained to us how much life sucks in this future: the few remaining cities on Earth are so packed full of people that they’re literally piled on top of each other in endless skyscraper slums. The quality of life here is somewhere between “a cockroach” and “a dead cockroach,” and that’s before you factor in the fanatical police force that runs everything. But Judge Dredd portrays these rioters as irredeemable villains with indecipherable motives, rather than a direct consequence of forcing people to live like tarantulas at a mall pet store.

The Chief Justices – the council of old white cops who run the government like a quorum made entirely of the police captain from the Lethal Weapon movies – spend several scenes wringing their hands over the constant rise in crime year after year, and the only solution they ever consider is state violence. The movie never bothers to prove them wrong. Furthermore, Max Von Sydow, the King of the Police, passionately declares that his badge stands for freedom roughly five minutes after we watch Dredd murder his way through a demonstration of civil unrest with futuristic hyper violence. The whiplash inflicted by the cognitive dissonance of this film is like riding a decommissioned roller coaster the night before it is finally demolished for killing too many children.

No matter how often the plot ferociously dangles a cautionary tale of the dangers of fascism in his face, Dredd refuses to learn anything. It’s almost impressive, like those British guards who aren’t allowed to flinch even if a space shuttle crashes right in front of Buckingham Palace.

He sends Fergee back to jail for tampering with an autonomous dumpster, when all Fergee did was hack his way inside to avoid being shot to death while Dredd chewed his way through the block war (which, again, was a riot against oppression). Even after enduring the punishment of being forced to team up with Rob Schneider for the rest of the film, Dredd never apologizes to Fergee or admits to misjudging him.

Rico, Dredd’s former friend and secret clone brother, went to jail for killing a bunch of people to foment a revolution against the council of judges. His ultimate plan is to produce a bunch of judge clones free from the genetic programming requiring them to be obedient to the council. Rico offers Dredd the chance to team up and help him topple the government and set up a new system where people are actually free. To reiterate, he is the villain of this film.

Dredd himself is falsely convicted of murder and uncovers a sinister conspiracy at the highest levels of government, demonstrating that the entire system has been corrupt from its conception. Neither the film nor any of its characters stop to reflect on the fact that Dredd and the other judges get to be tried by their peers, while everyone else in the world is condemned on the spot.

When the movie ends, nobody says, “Wow, we really need to change this system! Turns out fascism is super bad. If only libraries had survived the apocalypse so we might have known this ahead of time!” What happens instead is a crowd of people show up to cheer for Judge Dredd and offer him the position of King Policeman, but he turns it down to go back to being a street judge and the crowd continues cheering. It’s like a DUI class. There was a very important lesson here, and absolutely no one learned it. Dredd will presumably continue passing pitiless judgment on every person he encounters, because the movie has done nothing to indicate that he will do otherwise.

That’s what makes Judge Dredd so fascinating: it identifies the problems with unilateral justice and the need for due process, but has Dredd heroically walk off into the sunset determined to continue being a glorious instrument of fascism. Because fascism is the thing that lets him shoot people with a rad voice-operated gun, like Alexa with an uzi, and ride a motorcycle that believes it is cool, and that everyone in the film believes is cool, when in actuality it looks like a deeply unsexy travel bike that one of the Top Gear guys rented to go on a journey of self-discovery after getting cleaned out by a bitter divorce.

Stallone took a satirical property commenting on the Reagan-era mentality behind some of his biggest successes and hammered it into just another cop movie about shooting all the bad guys, which so profoundly misses the point that it should have won a Special Achievement award at the Oscars. Dredd wears a costume personally designed by Gianni Versace, which neatly encapsulates everything wrong with the movie. Our fascist hero is wearing a designer uniform, and we proudly announce this fact in the opening credits.

I simply couldn’t end this piece without discussing Armand Assante’s performance as Rico one last time. He snarls his way through every scene like the villain in a movie about a kid billionaire. He’s somewhere between Scarface and the Cat in the Hat, in that his explosions of anarchy range from mass murder to pushing over a single metallic bust.

The movie repeatedly insists that he is Sylvester Stallone’s twin brother, and nobody ever cracks a smile when confronted with this information. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, he has a pet robot.

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, and is wanted in several futures for the toppling of stuffy busts.

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