Rico Dredd - Film Version

Film Version

Rico appears as the main villain and antagonist in the 1995 Judge Dredd movie, in which Joe was played by Sylvester Stallone and Rico by Armand Assante. In this version, although they were cloned from identical DNA, they did not look the same. Rico was portrayed as a straightforward psychopath, having reached a point where he killed the innocent on the grounds that the division between guilt and innocence was merely a matter of timing and everyone would commit a crime in time. His deviant behavior was attributed to something going wrong in his creation which made him the perfect criminal. They were both friends in school (Joe was unaware of their true kinship, but it is unclear when Rico learned about their connection), but when he became a murderer, Joe judged him and sentenced him to life imprisonment, and his death was faked to reassure the public and prevent the truth of the clone program coming to light.

Rico later broke out of prison with help from Judge Griffin and killed a reporter who had been investigating the Judge program. Since he and Joe had the same DNA, Joe was wrongly convicted of the murder and given a life sentence. Griffin, Rico, and a scientist named Ilsa Hayden (Joan Chen) began working to reopen the cloning lab that created Rico and Joe. Griffin planned to create a new generation of Judges to enforce his views on the populace, but Rico wanted to create clones of himself to take over Mega-City One and killed Griffin to get him out of the way. Once Joe returned to the city, Rico tried to persuade him to join the effort; when Joe refused, Rico tried to kill him. The two fought atop the Statue of Liberty, and Joe threw Rico over the edge to his death.