Dredd (2012)
Directed by Pete Travis
In the future, America is a dystopian wasteland. The latest scourge is Ma-Ma, a prostitute-turned-drug pusher with a dangerous new drug and aims to take over the city. The only possibility of stopping her is an elite group of urban police called Judges, who combine the duties of judge, jury and executioner to deliver a brutal brand of swift justice. But even the top-ranking Judge, Dredd, discovers that taking down Ma-Ma isn’t as easy as it seems in this explosive adaptation of the hugely popular comic series.
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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 ."
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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.
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.
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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.
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.