Dredd

In 1995, a movie based on 2000 AD's British comic book character, Judge Dredd was released to theaters. It starred Sylvester Stallone in the title role. While the film was pretty fun in a really dumb way, it totally missed the essence of the character of Dredd. It made the mistake of removing his helmet. Judge Dredd did not and does not need to have his helmet removed. I assume they did that to try and bring some kind of depth to the character, but the truth is, Dredd as a comic book character didn't need to be more than being the ultimate lawman. While I don't think that Stallone did a horrible job, it wasn't a good movie. They tried to psycho-analyze the character, which was a huge mistake. In 2012 they tried another movie based on Judge Dredd.

The film opens up in a post-apocalyptic America in which America was ravaged by nuclear war. Now, 800 million American citizens live in a enormous city known as Mega City 01. Due to the apparent ineffectiveness of today's law enforcement and court system, a single person has been given the authority to dispense justice as Jury, Executioner, Judge. After taking out a group of criminals, Judge Dredd(Karl Urban) is tasked by the Chief Judge to assess a potential Judge, by the name of Anderson(Olivia Thirlby), who just so happens to be an extremely powerful psychic. The two Judges then go to a mega building named Peach Trees to investigate a triple-homicide. Little do they know that Peach Trees is ruled by a powerful criminal known as Ma-Ma(Lena Heady) When she discovers that one of her subordinates is arrested she locks down the entire building in an effort to find and kill the Judges, to keep her drug operations going.

First, let me say the differences between this movie and Stallone's film are night and day. They are not even the same beast, they just happen to feature the same character. While the Stallone film tried to get inside Dredd's cranium to find out what makes him tick, this new movie has no such pretenses, it's as pure an action film as you can get. Right from the get-go we get a feeling for how Dredd deals with situations. While he has some one-liners, he doesn't come across as a smart-ass. He doesn't joke around. While I think that Stallone was alright as Judge Dredd, Karl Urban really shines here. Dredd comes across as fairly one-dimensional, but for a movie like this, he doesn't need to be anything more. He needs to be shown that he won't be fucked with and will do whatever it takes to uphold the law. Olivia Thirlby's Anderson starts out as a timid rookie, but by the time the film ends, she's a hard-ass, and her psychic abilities allow her to mess with people's minds any way she wants. Olivia does a fantastic job showing that transformation. For the villain, Lena Heady's Ma-Ma is ruthless, willing to kill anyone who stands in her way. Lena Heady brings a real quiet menace to the character that will put you on edge. Everybody else is essentially cannon fodder.

This is a violent movie as you would expect a Judge Dredd movie should be. But unlike the previous movie, this one gets pretty gory, and some of that has to do with the visual effects. If you've ever seen some of those slow-motion videos like when a water balloon is exploding at 3,000 frames per second, making it extremely slow, they employ that in this movie, especially when Dredd and Anderson breach a drug den. It's beautifully violent. It's actually hard to tell what's really CG and what's real, in terms of how the effects are shown, and that's a testament to how good the visual effects artists are.

Dredd is an improvement in so many ways over the last movie, it's not even funny. For example, the only time you actually see Dredd without his helmet is at the start of the movie and you can't even see his face. So, he has the helmet on the entire movie, basically, and allows Karl Urban to portray Dredd as the bad-ass that he is. The story? Not so original and in fact, another movie with a similar premise exists already: The Raid-Redemption. Both are similar in terms of setup, but different in execution(see what I did there?) The Raid utilized hand-to-hand combat, and Dredd is all about the gun-play. Dredd flopped big time in the box-office, mostly because people were afraid it was going to be like Sylvester Stallone's movie. I can honestly tell you, Karl Urban's movie is a whole different animal. It's gritty, it's brutal and it's a hell of a lot of fun. It's a shame that it didn't get the box-office numbers it deserved, because critically speaking, it did very well. I'm hoping that if enough people buy Dredd on DVD/Blu-ray, we'll see a sequel. I loved what I saw, and I can't wait to see more in this style. Dredd gets 9/10.