1. No Relatable Characters
It must be one of the first things that is taught in Screenwriting 101; create characters your audience can relate to. They dont have to be someone who the audience literally feel exactly the same as, like Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins or other heroes from the same batch. But there needs to be something that the audience can latch on to. In fact I cant think of any great film that doesnt have at least one relatable character. By the end of Psycho, weve been at points directly following four different characters (Marion, Norman, Arbogast and Lila). One is stealing a vast sum of money from her boss and another is hiding the dead body of the woman who up until three minutes ago was the audiences viewpoints. And yet we still feel for the characters, understanding their motives and allowing them to bring us into their world. Judge Dredd is by his very nature an unlikable and unrelatable character. He is a literally faceless lawgiver working for a oppressive government with has no human characteristics who just kills people on the spot. He may work as the driving force of a short comic strip, but for 95 minutes (and a long 95 minutes at that) it doesnt work. You can imagine that was why Anderson was written into the script. A rookie training with Dredd, shes an orphan struggling to make the pass grade to become a Judge; typical empathy character. But Olivia Thirlby plays her so closed and the character's psychic ability only further distances her from the audience. To make things worse, as the film develops she looses all semblance of an emphatic role; after a brief moment of worrying over killing she is happy to gun down as many thugs as it takes. The lack of empathy with the characters is by far the worst thing in the film. We as an audience have no way in to the story and thus it all washes over us, highlighting just how poor the film actually is.