THE QUICK AND THE DREDD

By RICHARD CORLISS

Sly stallone stares out at the tortured futuristic landscape of Judge Dredd with a macho hauteur that seems to say, "Who's tougher than me?" And the answer is, the bosses of the major film studios. Compared with them, Stallone and his fellow summer-movie heroes--those mean-eyed, pumped-up, epigram-expectoratin' cinema studs--are prissy little honor-roll students. The real tough guys are fellows named Semel and Pollock and Roth; their battlefield is the summer calendar; they show their guts by slotting their big pictures to open in just the right week in hopes of killing the competition. This is the art of war, New Hollywood-style.

Sometimes it pays off: Batman Forever grabbed $106 million in its first 10 days in North American theaters. But the strategy has a sort of kamikaze logic. Since there are more big movies than early-summer weekends, most films--even the hits--will be seven-day wonders. So it has been, with few exceptions, this season. Crimson Tide gives way to Die Hard with a Vengeance is vaporized by Casper gets eaten by Congo is beaten by Batman Forever gets a poke in the eye from Pocahontas. Hey, it's a jungle out there. One weekend you're the lion king; the next, you're vulture chow.

So the burly, bombastic Judge Dredd, based on a popular series of British graphic novels, is best seen as a metaphor for the movie wars. As policeman, jury and executioner in the 22nd century, Joseph Dredd (Stallone) is supposed to be one potent dude, but he is manipulated and programmed by a ruling council. This Mega-City is fascism as fashion statement; Dredd's uniform has enough leather and metal to stock an S&M boutique. But he's just a soldier for hire, or a star looking for his next project. Dredd's warped mirror image is a renegade named Rico (Armand Assante), as dangerous to Dredd as the next action film on the release schedule. "Guilt and innocence--it's a matter of timing," Rico says. He could be describing the difference between summer hit and flop.

For all its superficial pleasures--like some clever production design and the splendor of a fight between two gorgeous women, Diane Lane and Joan Chen--Judge Dredd couldn't have worse timing. For one thing, it surfaces at the end of a 15-year line of dark sci-fi films; imagine Blade Runner inside a Tron video game. For another, the movie tries for the same combination of facetiousness and majesty that Batman Forever mined only two weeks before. Dredd, written by Michael De Luca, William Wisher and Steven de Souza, plays like an instant clone of the Gotham Gothic.

Alas, director Danny Cannon hasn't the skill to make majestic melodrama plausible. As for the facetiousness, Rob Schneider sweats arsenals of ammunition as Dredd's sarcastic sidekick. But the effect is redundant since Sly is his own comic relief. By now Stallone has become a symbol for all that is goofy and grandiloquent in Hollywood's live-action summer cartoons. The hormone that courses through his movie veins could be called preposterone.