Judge Dredd |
Roadshow Entertainment/Roadshow Entertainment .
R4 . COLOR . 96 mins .
M15+ . PAL |
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Take a popular comic book hero and bring him to the big screen. Slap a big name star into the lead role and you're sure of a hit. Usually the missing ingredient is the plot but in this case it was added, although only in small doses. It is the early 3rd millenium and the justice system has been replaced by a group of men known as the Judges. They take the law to the streets and were the police, jury and executioner all in one. The most decorated of all was Judge Dredd (Sylvester Stallone) who has lately taken the law to the extreme by following the book and losing all emotion. In an act of violence, Dredd kills a high ranking officer of the court and is charged and convicted. He is to spend the rest of his life in the same prisons that hold the criminals he himself put away. But did he commit the crime? Rico (Armand Assante) is one of the most lethal of criminals and his escape coincides with Dredds conviction. Now he has the ability to cause more havoc than these mega cities have seen. But there's more to Rico, more to Dredds conviction and more to a classified project named Janus than we are initially led to believe. And this is the flaw of the movie. It ends too abruptly and without the usual climactic ending that so befits previous Stallone movies.
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This is another excellent transfer from the big V. The picture is beautifully rendered throughout with a very sharp and detailed image. This anamorphic transfer boasts more detail than the non-anamorphic region 1 version. There is a noticeable difference here and a huge leap from the laserdisc version I used to own. The wow factor in this transfer is focused around the color saturation. This picture produces a very rich image with deeply saturated colors that never bleed. The opening scene has an evenly rendered orange/yellow graduation and scenes with the judges show-off the bright colors of their uniforms. The problem with the transfer is that it suffers from extended scenes with aliasing being very prominent. The increased sharpness is probably at fault but given the effort that was put into Shawshank Redemption, this could have been avoided; other than it being a source issue.
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Big Badda Boom. The soundtrack goes into overdrive from the very outset and only lets up during the quiet scenes. My new Onkyo 777 does a fantastic job of providing succinct channel separation and cinema equalised sound to really enjoy this aurul experience. In the opening scene, James Earl Jones' voice booms over the narrative right before a spaceship arrives on screen and rumbles the room. There's some more bass during the battle scenes but nothing that gets as deep as some demo material. Dialogue is clear at all times when Stallone isn't talking - "I am the luawww"
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It's not the greatest of movies but it's a decent comic book adaptation. Stallone is perfectly suited to the role given his superstar status and physique but his lines come across as a bumbling fool.
LINK: http://www.dvd.net.au/review.cgi?review_id=268
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