Movie Review - Dredd (2012)

I some serious love for Judge Dredd. I've been reading the comics on and off since the mid-80s. I always found the violent, satirical stories and over-the-top action to be very appealing...at least to my inner 13-year-old.

When Canny Cannon and a team of writers (something like 57 of them) unleashed Judge Dredd on the world, I was one of the few people to actually see it in the theaters. While I liked some of the design work (it did capture the look of the city as presented in the comics) nothing else really worked. Acting, story, direction, music...it was an exercise in tedium more than anything else.

When Dredd was released, I didn't bother to throw my hard-earned dollars at the box office. Too bad, because if I (as well as a few hundred thousand people) had, we might be getting a sequel to this awesome film.

On every level, this is much better adaptation of the Judge Dredd comics. Karl Urban has the look, the voice and, most improtantly, the attitude down. The design of the cityscape is not like that of the comics or the first film; it is an improvement. The anchoring the massive block towers and superhighways in a more realistic urban environment. The acting is uniformly good and the direction is taut, the non-stop action never getting boring (and yes, action can be boring...see Expendables 2).

Although there is no character arc for Judge Dredd, Olivia Thirlby's Anderson has a rookie-to-Judge development that, while expected, is well done. Thirlby manages to bring just the right amount of vulnerability to the character, balancing out the almost non-stop violence. Taking place in the halls and rooms of a massive apartment tower (200 floors, 75,000 inhabitants) from the opening rain of skinned bodies to drug King...ummm...queenpin Ma-Ma's (Lena Heady) end (a floor point-of-view shot of her head coming apart on impact, after being thrown from the top floor by Dredd) there is a continuous torrent of bullet hits, heads being blown apart, people being set on fire, dismembement and general bloody mayhem.

The story, thankfully, is not one of the typical "if we fail to do x, the world will end." Instead, while the stakes are high (control of part of the city drug trade, the lives of the protagonists) this really is just a normal day for Judge Dredd, trying to bring law and order to a city on the edge of chaos.

Setting Dredd in a more realistic, gritty, hyper-violent future works, making it a grimmer and more believable setting. Definitely worth seeing.