Once a paragon of playing gangsters in TV movies – very much the James Gandolfini of his day – I defy anyone to find a performance in Armand Assante’s entire catalogue that’s as fantastically good value for money as his ludicrous turn in Judge Dredd. The latter especially is one of the few things in 1995’s Judge Dredd that should have been incorporated into the source material.
Sure, there’s rather a lot of emphasis placed on Stallone’s armoured crotch, but there’s also those gorgeous dress tunics that the Judges swan about the Hall of Justice is, the sandy grey utilitarian Judge-Warden armour and the all enclosed totalitarian glamour of the SJS, the Judge-Hunters. While in Schumacher’s case that was entirely down to, with Judge Dredd it was a celebration of the fantastically fascistic, Gestapo chic of Gianni Versace’s costume design. It’s getting all steamy in here just thinking about it. Not since Joel Schumacher’s alluring vaseline lens soft-porn parody Batman & Robin have we had so many shots of people’s armoured buttocks or fetishised sequences of costumes coming on and off. Cliché abounds in great saccharine abundance, while Dredd and his evil clone brother Rico face off, Diane Lane’s Judge Hershey and Rico’s lady side-kick have a secondary tussle (“That’s Judge Bitch,” being a highlight of their verbal sparring), and Rico’s plummeting to his death, absolving our hero of any moral black spots in the audiences’ collective mind at least by having the responsibility of ending his life kindly taken from him by gravity. Study that scene above, the flying bike chase scene and it’s almost shot for the shot the same flying bike chase scene as Star Wars: Episode VI – Return Of The Jedi. Everything tried and tested over the prior two decades was entered into the big book of cliche until filmmakers were able to do everything by rote, every scene, character or event dictated by complex action movie algorithms on some mega-computer. The early-to-mid Nineties really was the last great age of the action movie.
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