The Sunday Times (London) July 23, 1995
The law of diminishing returns
Stephen Amidon
With its tired theme and unoriginal plot Judge Dredd is yes dreadful, says Stephen Amidon. At least the slapstick Mighty Morphin Power Rangers doesn’t take itself too seriously.
The future is a dismal place for movie-makers. Perhaps because their careers have such short life expectancies, they find it nearly impossible to imagine a posterity where Earth is a happy spot to live. In films as varied as Blade Runner, Dune and Total Recall, just about everything that can go wrong, will.
These dystopian projections inform Danny Cannon’s Judge Dredd (15). Based on the cult British comic book, this noisy, big-budget film posits a 22nd century where humankind huddles in crowded, riotous conurbations that are surrounded by pollution-blasted desert and tribes of murderous mutants. Crime is so rife in these ”Mega Cities” that traditional systems of justice have been abandoned in favour of roving ”Judges” who, upon encountering a suspect, serve as on-the-spot constable, magistrate, jury and, often, executioner. It is Rodney King’s worst nightmare come true.
And the biggest and baddest of these one-man vengeance squads is Judge Dredd, played with typically wooden resolve by Sylvester Stallone, an actor whose migration from the third dimension into the second finally seems complete. Despite his futuristic kit and advanced weaponry, Dredd is little more than a run-of-the-mill movie cop, tough as nails but haunted by an initially unspecified trauma that makes him both ruthlessly efficient in his work and incapable of having a meaningful relationship with women. He is, simply put, Dirty Harry in an armoured jumpsuit and crash helmet.
So much for the setup. As for the plot, anyone who has seen a dozen or so action films recently can fill in the rest. Maverick cop has run-in with authority. Maverick cop is framed by bad guys (who turn out to be allied with same authority). Maverick cop is dispatched to prison where he undergoes trial-by-fire before escaping, whereupon he returns to kick butt, take names, resolve that deep trauma and win the babe.
What is perhaps most disappointing about Judge Dredd (besides that increasingly familiar sensation of watching millions of potentially useful movie bucks sucked down the drain) is that Cannon’s directorial vision proves so utterly unoriginal. As source material, Dredd would seem to have several advantages over the slew of other comic books hitting the big screen these days, most especially a hip contemporaneousness (though this hardly helped Tank Girl), and the fact that it has not yet been translated on to celluloid. Cannon, still short of 30, has been given an opportunity not available to directors saddled with older Marvel and DC superheroes a first crack at imposing his sensibility on a popular subject.
But he blows it. The picture turns out to be little more than a noisy amalgam of familiar future-shock conventions, leavened with occasional echoes from various horror classics. The opening shots, with their doom-laden prologue and ponderous, screen-hogging spaceship, are reminiscent of Star Wars, while the first cityscapes we see bring Blade Runner to mind. There is even homage to Planet Of The Apes Dredd’s Mega-City One contains a partially buried Statue of Liberty, thereby letting us know it is New York. There is also a nod to The Silence Of The Lambs when we first encounter Dredd’s evil twin (Armand Assante) in his prison cell, surrounded as he is by moist stone, his square-shouldered back turned to camera. And the clan of cannibalistic rednecks who kidnap Dredd would seem to be direct descendants of Leatherface and Co from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Tarantino gets away with these sorts of quotations because he is able to weave them into his own unique fabric. With Cannon, however, the effect is to make the film seem tired and diffuse. With its routine storyline and unsurprising visuals, you feel as if you have already seen Judge Dredd before it is even 10 minutes old. All the volume, jump-cutting and vertiginous camerawork in the world (and Cannon seems willing to use every cheap device in the book) cannot mask the fact that the director has nothing to say that Robocop has not already said better.
Matters are worsened by the presence of Stallone, whose tendency to posture rather than act grows more pronounced with each film. The demands of costuming mean that only his mouth is visible for the first few scenes: an unfortunate choice, since it is his least compelling feature, a rubberised rictus that goes haywire when he attempts to snarl or wax polysyllabic. Stallone’s habit of slurring his dialogue is also a problem even three-word payoff lines come out garbled, leaving us to piece them together as Cannon’s raucous film thunders away.
And then there is Sly’s torso, surely the most often-seen square yard of flesh on the planet. From the moment he peeled off his robe in Rocky, through the sadomasochistic Rambo series, until now, we have been treated to the sight of Stallone’s pecs so often that the average cinema-goer could probably trace their every river of vein and mesa of muscle with eyes closed. Cannon’s proclivity for using nostrilcam to get right in his actors’faces only increases this unwanted intimacy, especially when Stallone is trussed up like St Sebastian by torturers. One could count the armpit hairs (if one were so inclined).
As for the remainder of the cast, they play it more or less straight, happy, it seems, to wait for the closing whistle and distribution of pay cheques. Diane Lane in a tight black uniform is as watchable as you would expect, and Cannon at least has the generosity to treat us to a claws-out wrestling match between her and Joan Chen. But nobody seems to have told Max von Sydow, reprising Alec Guinness’s role from Star Wars, that he is not a hologram. As for Assante, you can only feel sorry for any actor cast as Sly’s brother (this would even apply to Frank Stallone). The usually assured Assante seems so stunned by the mindlessness around him that he even manages to muff the film’s one good line when about to unleash a bunch of mutants on the world, he tonelessly shouts: ”Send in the clones!” Given the circumstances, it was so funny I forgot to laugh.
If you are a sentient adult, there are only two possible reactions to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Either you hate them or you have not heard of them. In the former case, this means you have young children who have been transformed into karate-kicking zombies after watching just a few minutes of these eerily compelling creatures. In the latter case, it means you are child-free and spend your Saturday mornings lying in bed, as you should.
After their volcanic success in a cheap-looking television show, the Rangers now hit the big screen in a not-quite-so-cheap-looking film. Despite a relatively lavish budget, however, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (PG) remains a curious hybrid of tepid California teen drama and ”chop-socky” karate serial. Watching it provides the strange sensation of channel-surfing without having to touch the remote.
As for the plot, well, suffice it to say that the film’s scrolled prologue announces that we are about to witness the tale of six extraordinary teenagers called upon by one Zordon to use their Zords in the fight against villains named Ivan Ooze and Rita Repulsa. After a pacy, joky opening sequence that includes a neat sky-surfing sequence and a good comic turn by the aforementioned Ooze (Paul Freeman, pitching camp), the film’s middle section bogs down mightily before a slam-bang finale in which our teens ”morph” into Zords (don’t ask) to do battle with some state-of-the-art monsters.
It is as noisy and as reliant on effects as Judge Dredd, though the film is redeemed by the director Bryan Spicer’s willingness to embrace and even promote its preposterousness. This perhaps explains the PG rating (compared to Dredd’s 15). Though both films are full of violence, Rangers’mayhem contains much slapstick humour and green slime instead of red blood, whereas Dredd’s is rife with snarling threats, prolonged gunplay and crimson exit wounds. Spencer and the screenwriter Anne Olsen even manage a funny reference to the late Kurt Cobain when Ivan Ooze senses the Rangers approaching, he puts his bulbous nose in the air and exclaims: ”Smells like teen … agers.”
One could perhaps make much of how Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie marks yet another milestone in the decline of modern cinema, though for this week I would reserve that honour for Judge Dredd. The former is too shamelessly inept and raucously good-humoured to be accused of anything worse than cashing in on a fleeting phenomenon. In the court of cinematic malfeasance, that is hardly a misdemeanour these days. Dredd, fittingly, still merits summary execution.
But perhaps the only real help a critic can be when faced with such a unique product as Power Rangers is to state whether or not it is suitable for kids. If memory serves correctly from the times I watched the television version before it was permanently and irrevocably banned from my besieged lounge, the film seems to place more emphasis on special effects and less on martial arts than its televisual cousin.
And while these effects are noisy and occasionally a tad frightening, they do diminish the Rangers’reliance on person-to-person violence. So, if you take your kid to see the film, the chances of turning him into a kick-boxing delinquent who puts himself in traction trying to back-flip off the sofa are some-what reduced. How is that for a recommendation?
