10 Overlooked Positives of Sylvester Stallone's Judge Dredd

3. Armand Assante's Rico Dredd

Stepping straight out of 2000AD lore, Dredd's own clone brother, Rico, gives the film its primary antagonist. And what he lacks in fidelity to the source material, actor Armand Assante more than makes up for with buckets of charisma and actorly intensity. The Rico Dredd of the comics (dead for years now) cuts a very different figure to that of Assante - most of his face has been replaced with prosthetics, for one thing, enabling him to survive the icy penal colony of Titan - but if you ignore the surface discrepancies, he makes a tremendous villain. Much of that is thanks to a terrific performance from Assante, making a believable physical threat for Stallone (no mean feat) and owning his every scene elsewhere. Sure, his is standard 90s action movie villainy, and it would have been great to see the Titan prosthetics, but he could well have popped up in a good Dredd adaptation and few would have even blinked an eye. His introduction (blasting out the prison governor's throat with a smuggled weapon) is among the film's strongest sequences, as is... well, every other scene in which he tends to appear. Judge Dredd has a lot of problems, but its treatment of Rico Dredd is among the least of them. Also - that voice.