Judges

The plot is rocky. The acting is somewhere south of a Jr. High School play. The cinematography is not bad but it looks like it was cut with a machete. I couldn't decide of this was an intentionally hokey flick or if the people behind it actually thought they were making a good film. Think Death Valley Days meets Mayberry RFD. People running around in a 'lawless' modern town wearing quick-draw 6 gun rigs. It has more than its fair share of 'cutsey' stuff. Picture the Good Guys pulling up to an old farm house, and parking the Ford Mustang right in front of a hitching rail. Picture the clerk in a hotel watching an obviously western (hemisphere) movie sporting a Japanese sound track but with English sub-titles. It's all really strange but might be improved if watching it while partaking in a little peyote. It's a real curiosity with modern parallels to every western movie cliché you can think of. There's even a modern version of the good hearted dance-hall girl, AND a twanging Jew's-harp in the soundtrack. Really! If someone brings this to your home for a Saturday night movie session, tell 'em your DVD player died.

It's sad when you can see what a movie was attempting to do, and it is quite obvious that it fell far far short of the mark. Film students should take this as a lesson and a warning. Would be graduate has an idea. He wants total control. So he writes, directs, produces, his cinematic masterpiece all by himself. Usually, his concept is far beyond his budget. Usually he writes an overblown script full of every tag line he can come up with. Usually, he is more interested in the grand sweep of the story rather than on the nitty gritty of working with actors on individual scenes. Usually, he ends up with a movie that is feeble in it's attempt to create miracles on a tiny budget. Usually, he ends up with a series of encounters (we cannot do justice by calling them scenes) that feel like they were written by a 12 year old. And usually he ends up with badly acted scenes that fail to grab the viewer. When you look at Judges from this perspective you can immediately tell it's just the usual fare.

I can see where the film makers were going with this. But they never really reach their destination. It's supposed to be a homage to Spaghetti westerns albeit set in a sort of mythical modern time frame." But unfortunately it fall short in its attempt. It doesn't have that gritty realism that spaghetti westerns are known for. The characters are not vile and desperate enough like their Italian western counterparts. And, failing these two points, it lacks the humor of a successful parody. In fact it looks like they intended to make a serious film, but upon completion realized they had missed the mark so far that it couldn't possibly be taken seriously. Unfortunately, they also missed the humor mark by a mile. A whole lotta bad movie!

Have you ever seen Kill Bill? Allow me to point out that it was shot in a "Comic Book" style, i.e., EVERYTHING was exaggerated: from the dialogue to the action sequences, to the cinematography, the music and even the characters themselves are exaggerated. The reason why is that most comic books (that I have read anyway) have characters that are bigger than life and the themes are exaggerated perceptions of reality. So naturally, these type of films are going to seem kind of cheesy. Why? Because it is a fable. Nothing about it is based on reality. There are no mutants saving us from the destruction of other mutants bent on world domination, no struggling journalist who possesses spider-like capabilities, and no superhuman that can leap tall buildings in a single bound, and so far I have not seen a vigilante dressed up in a bat costume…well, except for Halloween, maybe.

Try to make a comic book based on the movie "Crash". It's not going to work.

My point is "Judges", like "Kill Bill" was shot in this fashion…an homage to the spaghetti western with a modern flair shot in a comic book fashion.

The only difference is, Mr. Tarantino has had a few features under his belt, had a professional Hollywood cast and crew and is backed up financially by the Weinsteins.

Mr Walker has only made one feature and only had the financial help of family and friends, and had his fellow film students as his cast and crew. The majority of the people involved in this feature were very green when it came to feature films. That being said, I think Mr. Walker did a great job with his first feature film. I have seen worse come from the seasoned "Hollywood professionals" than this newbie director from Virginia.

Sadly IMDb does not allow me to rate Judges lower than 1. What a shame. This ghastly movie is so bad that I actually turned the damned thing off well before the ending. The script had a few bright moments, but the directing, editing, acting, audio quality, and especially timing on line delivery was so abhorrent as make Judges utterly unbearable.

Judges was advertised as being like a modern day comic book style western, but in reality was nothing of the sort. What it is most like is dog poop on the bottom of your shoe. You can try to pretend it is okay, but it just keeps on stinking.

Why video stores think it is okay to carry this kind of crap with constant gaps in the audio and worse than high school drama class acting is beyond me. We rent movies in order to see something better that what is on television. But Judges is worse than the most pathetic SciFi Channel original. I intend to demand my money back from Hollywood Video.