Will new 'Dredd' film miss the mark?

Can a faithful movie adaptation of "Judge Dredd" be made?

One reason I ask is because the last one missed the mark so badly. (That was 1995's "Judge Dredd," starring Sylvester Stallone; a new adaptation, "Dredd 3D," has just opened and stars Karl Urban.) Another is that I'm not sure a faithful adaptation could work on the big screen, and maybe it shouldn't be tried. That's because "Judge Dredd," the English comic-book strip that began in 1977, works on more than one level. One level is straight action-adventure science fiction, which Hollywood does very well.

The premise of "Judge Dredd" is a dystopic future where atomic war has rendered huge parts of the globe uninhabitable, except for mutant animals and humans. The bulk of humanity lives in walled-off "mega-cities" that cover huge tracts of land, but not nearly enough land -- people are stacked on top of each other in city-block-size apartment complexes. And not only are people being driven crazy by the lack of living space, but they are mostly unemployed, as robots do all the work. The combination means that the mega-cities are essentially ungovernable, as people follow fads in a frenzied fashion and occasionally erupt into murderous violence. Virtually all activity is illegal on some level.

Enter the judges, who supply the only law enforcement. They are police, judge, jury and executioner all in one, riding the streets on high-tech motorcycles dispensing frontier justice. The scariest judge of all is our title character, Judge Dredd, a clone of the first judge whose sense of justice is unwavering, who is absolutely incorruptible and whose sentences -- including death -- cannot be swayed by any appeal to his humanity.

Because, essentially, he doesn't have any. There's the second level of "Judge Dredd": self-parody. The creators of Judge Dredd took the "Dirty Harry" idea, which Europeans don't admire at all, to its logical extreme. They also incorporated all the cliches Europeans hold of Americans, of gun-crazy cowboys whose solution to everything is ultraviolence. In short, the judges are not necessarily good guys. Judges are also barred from having any romantic involvement. So, I ask you, how can Hollywood successfully make a movie where the hero borders on self-parody, where romance is out of the question and where tough-guy dialogue is often ironic? Because in 1995 we got exactly that: an action/adventure movie where Dredd was unquestionably the good guy, where he had a romance with Judge Hershey (who is Chief Judge in the comics) and where there was absolutely no irony whatsoever when Stallone growled Dredd's catchphrase, "I am the law!"