Film #68 - Dredd

Ok, so lots of film to catch up on before After Dark starts, so let’s make this a quick one.

Dredd is an ultra-violent, blood –soaked, action thriller that is just smart enough to hold itself together for people who are fans of that genre. Everyone else might struggle a bit with the almost cartoonish violence but you can’t really say it didn’t do exactly what it said on the tin.

Playing out almost like a video game, Dredd is set in a dystopian future where much of the world has been destroyed and what is left is packed into huge incredibly dense mega-cities where law enforcement is practised by cops known as Judges because they are ‘judge, jury and executioner’ all in one.

Dredd takes place over the course of a single 24 hours where established Judge, Dredd (Karl Urban) is tasked with overseeing and evaluating the training of rookie Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) who is not technically qualified for the job but has been bumped up to a passing grade because of her unusual psychic prowess.

To comic fans everywhere's rejoice,
the helmet stays on all movie

Investigating what they expect to be a routine murder in 200-floor apartment block ‘Peach Trees’ , Anderson’s powers tip them off that this murder is linked to the sudden widespread distribution of the newest drug plaguing the city, Slo-Mo, which causes users to experience time moving in incredibly slow motion.

The kingpin behind Slo-Mo, Ma-Ma (Lena Headey) soon realises her empire is at risk and locks down Peach Trees before the judges can exit, forcing them to battle their way up all 200 (and their armed residents) before they can be let out and put an end to Slo-Mo’s spread.

What happens next is inventive in its violence and not for the faint of heart, playing out somewhere between Die Hard and The Raid in terms of sheer brutality.

Ma-Ma has reasons to want to be on top of the heap

As I say, it works if that’s the reason you came. Judge Dredd is, of course, a character from the long-running comic 2000 AD and his last film outing famously flopped due to Hollywood making too many changes to his core character and background.

This time around we’re on a much more loyal streak and fans of the comic can feel comfortable that, if there are a few liberties taken here and there, they’re at least being treated with respect.

Dredd is fairly true to his roots here being a dedicated (to the point of complete dispassion) law enforcer who doesn’t hesitate in his swift and direct response to crime. In many ways he’s a hard character to make your protagonist which is probably where we wrong in 1995’s Judge Dredd. This time round though, the audience has his constant sidekick Anderson to fill their role on the screen allowing Dredd himself to actually be Dredd.

Employee orientation is brutal in the future.

It’s a dynamic that works well, no less so than because Anderson as a character bucks the expectation that she will be a naïve damsel in distress. Although much more human in her approach, she also is efficient and ruthless when the moment calls for it.

Olivia Thirlby is really the actor who holds the film together in this regard, though Karl Urban as Dredd himself certainly fills the helmet well. Rounding out the top cast, Lena Headey is reliably malevolent as Ma Ma, though I did yearn for the more subtle evils of Cersei Lannister after this performance.

Exploding jaw? Tip of the iceberg.

One thing that didn’t quite gel for me though was the world itself, though this was a relatively minor problem. Although Dredd correctly realises that the Judge system is not a significant improvement on anarchy (the only even respond to about 6% of crime, we are told), and that the Judges themselves are essentially violent Fascists, the film underlines the resulting human misery so earnestly it doesn’t make sense. We’re told about 92% of residents of the 200 floor Peach Trees are unemployed, yet there are businesses clearly visible on most of the floors Dredd visits. Who is manning them? Who is buying Slo-Mo, if no one can afford it? It’s a minor thing but, when placed in the mise en scene, it drove me nuts all movie.

Still, for an action film I’d initially dismissed as a brain-dead waste of time, the charms of Dredd for genre fans are enough to overcome such small inconsistencies.