While in Schumacher’s case that was entirely down to, with Judge Dredd it was a celebration of the fantastically fascistic, Gestapo chic of Gianni Versace’s costume design. It’s getting all steamy in here just thinking about it. Not since Joel Schumacher’s alluring vaseline lens soft-porn parody Batman & Robin have we had so many shots of people’s armoured buttocks or fetishised sequences of costumes coming on and off. Cliché abounds in great saccharine abundance, while Dredd and his evil clone brother Rico face off, Diane Lane’s Judge Hershey and Rico’s lady side-kick have a secondary tussle (“That’s Judge Bitch,” being a highlight of their verbal sparring), and Rico’s plummeting to his death, absolving our hero of any moral black spots in the audiences’ collective mind at least by having the responsibility of ending his life kindly taken from him by gravity. Study that scene above, the flying bike chase scene and it’s almost shot for the shot the same flying bike chase scene as Star Wars: Episode VI – Return Of The Jedi. Everything tried and tested over the prior two decades was entered into the big book of cliche until filmmakers were able to do everything by rote, every scene, character or event dictated by complex action movie algorithms on some mega-computer.

The early-to-mid Nineties really was the last great age of the action movie.

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