Pete Travis
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Connections, in both directions
That's it: just one long chase up a skyscraper, an idea simple enough to have served as the basis for one of the greatest of all action films, Die Hard , as well as the Indonesian The Raid: Redemption , which was in U.S. theaters earlier this year; it's also the central idea behind most of the brawler arcade games of the 1990s, which Dredd practically is already - it even has two playable characters.
“Die Hard” and last year’s Indo-Australian thriller “The Raid” are versions of this set-up that work.
It's the Die Hard formula transferred into the future.
Setting an action film within a contained space is an excellent way to keep it tight and thrilling, but it's also a risk, since the formula has been done well so many times-- Die Hard set the standard, and films as recent as this year's The Raid have improved upon it.
Set almost entirely within a single high rise building, it invokes memories of Die Hard.
It and Dredd follow frighteningly similar plot lines, and both shoot-'em-ups owe Die Hard for their lock-down, knock-down conceit.
From the distance provided by introductory helicopter shots of the city, the futuristic metropolitan slum of Mega-City One looks fairly staid by the dystopian standards set by Blade Runner, among others.
It’s a product of a simpler era of comic book adaptations, in which complexity was traded for overt style, which the Blade Runner -esque Mega-City One admittedly had with surprising detail.
There are moments that make violent murders look like a beautiful ballet sequence (recalling Joanna Cassidy’s demise in Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner ), bodies being crushed, bullets tearing through flesh.
It may not be perfect, but it’s far more palatable than Dredd’s first cinematic outing, especially tweaked up with the violence and horror-level bloodletting rather than the sanitized cartoon version that looked more like Dick Tracy when it would have been better served echoing Blade Runner .
We have visuals ripped straight from the vast cityscape of Blade Runner , the wizardry of The Matrix and the intolerable slow motion of Watchmen , among others.
Dredd was a satiric, sci-fi spin on the impulse that produced the "Dirty Harry" and "Death Wish" movies.
Judge Dredd, a dystopian Dirty Harry, who policed the broken society of the future dispensing swift justice, because you can’t trust the citizenry’s peers when they’re all up to their necks in it, was reimagined as Sylvester Stallone: a cobalt eyed lunk.
It is a moment where the audience are meant to be smiling along with Dredd, we are to delight in the fact (very much in the same way of something like Dirty Harry ) that the law is placed in the hands of one individual and that he’s enacting his own form of justice, which is a fascistic ideology.
That's it: just one long chase up a skyscraper, an idea simple enough to have served as the basis for one of the greatest of all action films, Die Hard , as well as the Indonesian The Raid: Redemption , which was in U.S. theaters earlier this year; it's also the central idea behind most of the brawler arcade games of the 1990s, which Dredd practically is already - it even has two playable characters.
If you saw last year’s superior police-invasion-of-a-very-bad-guy-stronghold, “The Raid: Redemption,” you experienced the better, more exciting film.
We follow the trials of the helmeted law enforcement officer (the face-obscuring headgear remains atop good-sport actor Karl Urban's dome for the entire running time, as it should), who is judge, jury, and executioner in a plot that is otherwise a retread of The Raid: Redemption.
Directed by Pete Travis, "Dredd 3D" becomes burdened by the same structural dilemma as the recent "The Raid: Redemption" — once the cops are locked into fighting their way out of the building the film simply becomes a monotonous series of bad-guy confrontations.
Pretty soon, you have The Raid: Redemption with less martial arts and a lot more exploding bodies.
Upon seeing the trailers and TV spots for " Dredd 3D ," you probably noticed how similar it looks to " The Raid: Redemption ."
Lena Headey also does legitimate work as Ma-Ma, channeling her best impression of Gary Oldman from “True Romance.”
“Aliens” star Michael Biehn auditioned for the role and as an unabashed fan of his, I would have loved to have seen his Dredd, but Urban brings a sweet Clint Eastwood homage to the role that is perfectly fitting for the character.
Aliens star Michael Biehn reportedly auditioned for the role and as an unabashed fan of his, I would have loved to have seen his Dredd, but Urban brings a sweet Clint Eastwood homage to the role that is perfectly fitting for the character.
…the narrative structure of “Vantage Point,” as it switches different perspectives with each 20 minute countdown…
…movies that use Rashomon-style storytelling from The Usual Suspects to Snake Eyes, Elephant and Vantage Point…
Pearce construye la película teniendo como referencia el vertiginoso ritmo de películas de acción recientes como la trepidante The Raid (2011) de Gareth Evans o la hiperestilizada de violencia del remake Dredd (2012), películas que también llevan a cabo la mayor parte de su desarrollo en un edificio y que hacen un extraordinario uso del espacio para construir elegantemente toscos set pieces que brillan por su ausencia en Hotel para criminales, cuya acción es genérica y sus intentos de violencia estrambótica, penosos.
It might not be the next John Wick or the next Dredd in terms of igniting an action franchise or a cult fan base, but it certainly has fun in the space it’s created.
Sure, there are bound to be countless comparisons of Dredd to the recent indie action flick The Raid, but that's pretty unfair since Travis' film certainly stands on its own two feet (besides, Assault on Precinct 13 did it first back in 1976).
Karl Urban’s snarling, bestubbled lawman never does anything so impertinent as taking his helmet off: instead, in a plot thread burrowed from more than one Eastwood picture, not least Dirty Harry instalment The Enforcer, he mentors a rookie, murders hoods with the law’s full support and shows the city’s chief gang leader who’s boss by tossing her right hand man from a 70 storey balcony.
The scene does remind me of “The Raid: Redemption,” and, to some extent, it’s similar to 2012’s criminally forgotten “Dredd.”
The film’s aggressively simplistic dialogue and outlandish production design (Stallone’s codpiece makes David Bowie’s Labyrinth get-up look conservative) only cements the film’s attempts to simplify the character and his world for audiences who, surely, could not have possibly accepted the story for what it is.
However, in a similar way to how The Raid isn’t all that removed from Dredd (two other brutal and similarly plotted action films that came out around the same time back in 2012), they are united in their feverish commitment to dishing out some extremely gory action that few other filmmakers would care to exhibit nowadays.
Remakes and reboots always seem to demand comparisons to their predecessors, but “Dredd” evokes a slightly different relationship: What Zack Snyder’s “Dawn of the Dead” is to George Romero’s original, Pete Travis’ film is to, no, not Danny Cannon’s 1995 film “Judge Dredd,” but Paul Verhoeven’s “Robocop.”
A blunt, overtly ugly remake of the much-maligned Stallone vehicle Judge Dredd, the film rehashes the exaggeratedly dystopic vision of an American future imagined by RoboCop 's New Detroit in what is here known as Mega-City One, which is in fact an only marginally CGI-augmented Johannesburg.
Dredd was a satiric, sci-fi spin on the impulse that produced the "Dirty Harry" and "Death Wish" movies.
The former vision might have played out like Starship Troopers in different hands, but the Dredd of Travis's film is more of the latter.
What Dredd feints at, before retreating to action flick convention, is the first real successor to Alex Proyas’ Dark City : a film totally immersed in a singular, majestic science-fiction milieu, exploring its frightening details while propelling forward a utilitarian but enthralling story.
She should join the ranks of Gary Oldman in “The Professional” and Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight”.
It's clear Penn, who cowrote with Don MacPherson (1998's "The Avengers") and Pete Travis ("Dredd"), is at least trying to say something about relief work in third world countries, but the film slips so quickly into generic thriller mode it feels like it mutated in post-production.
If there’s one individual embodying the bizarre yet still crass schizophrenia of the film, it’s Penn, who not only gets to be soulful before murdering countless private contractors, but who also snags a co-writing credit alongside Don Macpherson and Pete Travis (director of the embattled cult hit "Dredd").
It’s easy to point the finger at the script, credited to the unlikely trio of Penn, Dredd director Pete Travis, and re-write specialist Don MacPherson; if ever a movie felt like it was glued together from unrelated drafts, this is it.
Penn and his co-writers Don MacPherson (The Avengers) and Pete Travis (Dredd) haven’t worked their pens as hard as Sean did his biceps.
Unfortunately, a lot of the positive momentum on the directorial front is lost by Don MacPherson (The Avengers – 1998 version) and Pete Travis’ (director of Dredd) script adaptation of the novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette.
Unlike, say, “Escape From New York” — which it resembles — there’s no pulp personality here.
In America, where there’s always been a latent fear, safely explored in future shocks like Robocop and Escape from New York, that too much freedom will eventually lead to chaos, the on screen solution is always the same: oppressive violence.
Dredd 3D is a comic-book movie in every way in which it doesn’t really matter to the casual viewer – there’s no vast suspension of disbelief required, no more so than that required for Seventies cop thrillers, contemporary crime dramas like The Wire and The Shield, or the downbeat, low-cost, no-good future of Escape From New York or Mad Max .