Classic Movie Review: 'Judgment Night'

Judgment Night (1993)

Directed by Stephen Hopkins

Written by Lewis Colick

Starring Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Jeremy Piven, Stephen Dorff, Denis Leary

Release Date October 15th, 1993

Published October 16th, 2023

The most interesting aspect of 1993's action flick, Judgment Night is how star Emilio Estevez held the producers over a barrel. Estevez is rumored to have been very low on the list of actors that the producers wanted for the lead role of Frank in Judgment Day. Naturally, they were chasing a big star, Tom Cruise and he passed. That didn't work so they went to Christian Slater who also passed. The role was then passed on by John Travolta and Ray Liotta before landing at the feet of Emilio Estevez. The production had a small window to actually shoot and complete the film and with that, the studio offered Estevez the role because he was available and so many others said no. And then Estevez asked for $4 million dollars for the role and he got it.

That's way more interesting than what happens in this dopey urban action drama which posits a mostly empty downtown Chicago, a fully dystopian Chicago that is desperately violent but also a ghost town and also supposed to be modern for 1993. Four buddies are traveling to the big city from the suburbs in order to attend a boxing event. Frank (Estevez) is joining his best friend Mike (Cuba Gooding Jr), Frank's brother, John (Stephen Dorff), and their obnoxious, pushy, irritating pal Ray (Jeremy Piven) for the trip to the city.

Because his personality apparently isn't obnoxious enough, Ray decides to scam his way to borrowing a gigantic, obnoxious motor home to take the four friends to the city for the fight. Unfortunately, the group fails to account for Chicago traffic on a night when there is a giant sporting event and they wind up missing the start of the event while trapped on an expressway. With time slipping away, Ray makes an illegal turn and uses an off-ramp to try and sneak around traffic. The group ends up in the dystopian future set of Chicago, unrecognizable to suburban yokels like themselves.

As the group bickers about being lost, Ray hits a pedestrian with the motor home. Forced to stop by his friends, Ray frets about going to jail as his buddies tend to the injured pedestrian. To say this pedestrian is having a rough night would be an understatement. Not only was he just hit by a motor home, he'd been shot in the gut just before the accident. Clutching a bag full of ill-gotten cash, the man begs for help and the friends force Ray to try and find a hospital, despite his desire to abandon the injured man and avoid going to jail for drunk driving and vehicular assault.

Mike takes over driving and the group is on the run, choosing to try and chase a police car on its way to call. That's when the motor home is struck by a car and forced off the road. The motor home finally comes to rest trapped between two buildings. The men in the car that hit them turn out to be gangsters. led by Fallon (Denis Leary). The gangsters break open the back of the motor home to snatch the injured man and they kill him. They then want to kill the witnesses to that killing and set off after our suburban commandos who rush off into those famously empty Chicago streets.

Judgment Night then becomes a chase movie with our heroes trying to outrun the baddies while getting no help from anyone. If you met Ray, you probably wouldn't help him either. Jeremy Piven has turned the obnoxious meter up to 100 in Judgment Night. But, the cancelled former star of Entourage isn't the only poor performance in Judgment Night. Indeed, the entire cast is exceptionally bad. The usually reliable Estevez is dead behind the eyes and very obviously bored of the material, even as he's getting paid far too much to star in the movie.

Cuba Gooding Jr., a terrifically charismatic actor in the right role, is rendered dull by being given a single beat to play throughout the entire movie, that of a man desperate to prove how macho he is. Stephen Dorff's arc is going from being a coward to being slightly less of a coward. Denis Leary is the cause for these limited character arcs as Fallon, a villain driven by being a villain, I guess. He's paranoid that the guys in the motor home will call the cops and testify against him for murder and so he wants them all dead. It's a simple motivation, fine.

Why Fallon didn't just force everyone out of the motor home before executing the pedestrian from earlier is a plot convenience and little more. If he'd been smart enough to get everyone out of the motor home initially, the movie would have ended with our protagonists murdered in the empty streets of Chicago. No, he has to give them time to run so that we have a movie. Judgment Night was already a lost cause at that point as we sink into the realization that these are the characters we're intended to follow and try to care about. But the plot convenience doesn't help much.

The chase sequences of Judgment Night are lame even as they are proficiently staged. Director Stephen Hopkins is not a bad director, he's merely saddled himself with a deeply unlikable group of characters and a rote chase plot that requires far too much suspension of disbelief. Having been to Chicago on several occasions I find it just a tad implausible that the streets of Chicago are entirely empty for miles on end. Businesses lie dormant but also have fresh produce out in the middle of the night? Buses pass through but don't stop, and the cops have apparently abandoned this part of town as they ignore numerous calls from both our protagonists and any one of the few people they cross paths with along the way.

There should be tension in the potential deaths of our main characters but there just isn't. Ray, for one, is such an obnoxious character that we kind of hope he gets caught and executed so we can be done with him. When Ray does meet his fate, it should be sad and terrifying but it's mostly cathartic for the audience because we are finally free of the tedium of Jeremy Piven's manic, sweaty, desperate performance. Unfortunately, his loss doesn't improve the movie, rather it exposes just how much Emilio Estevez really doesn't care to be here. Without Piven's irksome presence, Estevez's bored, dead-eyed performance becomes clear and the movie drags on into further tedium.

I'm told that Judgment Night has a remarkable, groundbreaking soundtrack that brought together rap and rock stars on mash up collabs that are still beloved to this day. The music did nothing for me, but I'm happy someone found something to enjoy about Judgment Night. I, on the other hand, was left mildly irritated and mostly bored by Judgment Night. It's not bad enough to be memorable and it's certainly not good. The film is professionally crafted but the movie is ultimately soulless. The acting is either broad and camp or bored and dead-eyed and the action carries the same lifeless vibe.

Judgment Night is the subject of the next episode of the I Hate Critics 1993 Podcast, a spinoff of the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast. Each week, myself along with Gen-Z'er M.J and Gen-X'er Amy, watch the movies that came out 30 years ago that weekend. The goal is to see and comment on how movies and culture have changed in just 3 decades. It's a fun experiment, especially having a Gen-Z'er experience pop culture of the 90s. You can hear the I Hate Critics 1993 podcast wherever you listen to the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast.