Lana and I watched the new Judge Dredd movie the other
night. We both thought it was one of the god-awfulest pieces of crap we’d seen
in ages. Normally I’m more tolerant of movie dreck than she is but in this case
I was the first to state my opinion on it. It was the slow-mo, you see. At
least at first. Slow-mo is over used but I don’t mind it under certain
circumstances. Lana and I also watched “The Warriors” and there’s a scene where
a guy gets thrown through the wooden door of a bathroom stall in slow-mo. I
thought it worked well. We both like that movie quite a bit, although are under
no impression that it is high art.
The problem with the slow-mo in Judge Dredd was that it went
on and on and on. It was tied to the use of this drug that slowed down time for
people, and also apparently made everything sparkly. I think the drug was
pretty clearly modeled on heroin. I suppose the connection between the drug
effects and the slow-mo made sense, but what we’re treated to is people smoking
“slow-mo” pipes and then everything gets really…well, slow. There’s one scene
where the bad woman is taking a bath while smoking, and we get a couple of
minutes of her sweeping her hand through the water in slow-mo while her hand
makes sparkly splashes. Later we get to see a person fall from a 200 or so
story building in slow-mo. I can hardly overstate how boring that was. Slow-mo
for 5 seconds of a guy getting thrown through a door is far different from 2
minutes of someone taking a bath or falling.
There were plenty of other things about Judge Dredd I didn’t
care for. First, it was basically a Dirty Harry movie, which, for me, made
everything 100 percent predictable. Second, the special effects were generally “meh,”
and the sparkly stuff reminded me personally of Twilight. Third, they kill
Judge Dredd at one point. Only…not. A bad guy shoots Dredd through a wall with
an armor piercing round. We clearly see blood start to pour from Dredd’s chest
on the right side under his armor. We see him slide to the ground. There’s a
hole the size of a man’s fist in the wall where the bullet came through. But it
turns out that it’s just a flesh wound through the lower right side of his body
and he slaps some first aid stuff on it and then gets up to wipe out more bad
guys. Sorry, you just can’t do that.
I was reminded of trying to watch one of the early SF TV
serials once. They were running the episodes back to back so I knew I could
catch them all. One episode ended with the intrepid hero tied up in a rocket
sled rushing toward a cliff. The sled went over the cliff and exploded,
indicating to everyone that the hero had to be dead. Except! In the sequel
episode, we saw the same exact scene with the rocket sled rushing toward the
cliff, except this time a previously invisible door opened in the side and the
hero leaped to safety just before the sled went over the cliff. This was the
equivalent of that.
And yet! When Lana went on Internet Movie Data Base she saw
the movie was rated at 7 of 10 stars. And people I know and like and whose
opinions I listen to have told me they liked it. How can this possibly be? How can
my observations and opinions on a movie be so diametrically opposed to those of
other intelligent people?
Sometimes it’s kind of depressing to be so at odds with the
world.
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