Movie Review: Dredd

Dredd (2012)

In a violent, futuristic city where the police have the authority to act as judge, jury and executioner, a cop teams with a trainee to take down a gang that deals the reality-altering drug, SLO-MO. Short synopsis of Dredd taken from IMDb.com  

Surprisingly enough, Dredd has a rating of 7.1 on IMDb.com (when I checked it fro this review, that is).  Just goes to show that there are people out there who will say nice things about anything.

I'll get the name-associated pun out of the way right off the bat and say that this film wasn't entirely Dredd-ful, but it wasn't that great for me.  Nothing I'd watch again.  In fact, let's spoil the ending of this review and admit that I fell asleep before it ended.  Not because the film was boring, though it could be considered that; after the non-stop uber-violence and predictability wore through my already tired senses (I watched it at 2 AM on a Saturday night/Sunday morning) and stopped having any real meaning.  No, it just didn't do anything for me personally.

Nice helmet.  Tell me, can you really see anything out of that?  I think the tips of the downward arcing red strips would make my vision go all wonky, personally. / Source: comicvine.com

Ya know, it's funny when you actually miss the cheesy but well-intentioned antics of 1995's Sly Stallone pic, Judge Dredd.  I'm not saying Karl Urban wasn't convincing in the role, because he was enough for me.  I'll tell you, the thing about this film I didn't like was its convenience of plot crossed to its extreme violence and gore. 

What do I mean?  Well, we get gunshot wounds that are probably quite realistic.  I'm not a doctor or a forensic pathologist or anything, but when we see bullets rip through people's bodies in this film, there is usually not the small pinprick of impact and then the spurt of squib blood pack in most movies.  No, we get full-on, mostly CGI-rendered blood splattering.  It's a horror film's trick that gets all the nuances covered in Dredd. 

And though it is... dare I say, refreshing? - to see some accuracy in gun-related violence upon human anatomy in a Hollywood film, it loses all meaning really quickly.  We don't care about any of these people.  Not really.  It all becomes gore for gore's sake really fast.  Which turned me off, and makes me worry about younger people who like this sort of thing.  They see the blood and mess, and they get a kick out of it, but there is no pain and no emotional impact.  This could have a bad result on the psyche's of the impressionable.  They might think: "I can shoot up a hallway full of people and there will be nothing 'real' to it.  Just a lot of blood.  Since I feel no pain, they feel no real pain."  And to me, that's scary.

The comic series Judge Dredd must have some kind of decent following.  Somebody considered the scene on the right to be worthy of permanet skin art, as seen on the left.  I'd have stuck with "Mom" in a heart, or "Death Before Dishonor" myself. / Source: maffikus.deviantart.com (left) / comicvine.com (right)

Back to the movie.  How do I see those bloody gunshot wounds so well?  This film actually gives a reason for the over-used slow motion effects in modern action films, i.e.: the drug SLO-MO.  People who have taken this drug see everything happening in extreme slow motion, and so we get their perspective and watch all kinds of nasty things happen.  Like early on in the movie, we get a slight dose of what it must be like to fall from a really high building onto really hard pavement.  This is the impetus for the Judges to arrive at the building which is the home for the majority of the movie, three skinned-alive gangsters tossed from high up in an urban city-block sized apartment complex.  It was gruesome.  In fact, here they seem to have cut the viewer a break and reduced the gore, as the flaying of these men is somewhat blooded-down and done off-screen, to an extent.  But we still see some of it.  And we see enough of the remains of these men on the pavement to give the act a visceral reaction.  But like I said, this only keeps the ball running (after a car-chase shoot-out that introduced our lead character, who never took his mask off throughout the parts of the film I saw, and therefore did retain some of his persona's... dare I say it - charm?  No, that's a bit much, but you maybe get the idea).

Oh yeah, we have a stereotypical female partner who is a mutant and can read minds, and who becomes the damsel in distress when she is captured mid-way through.  We get a touch of nudity/sexuality when her abductor taunts her by saying "what am I thinking about?" and she visualizes her own violent rape scene, as well as some other sexual references having to do with the mind battle abductor and abductee have.  Oh, but our head-villain - a woman, which I thought actually made for a nice touch - named "MaMa," says no raping and torturing of this young Judge when the hostage arrives at the top floor lair.  This is conveniently explained by the fact that these two Judges are supposedly going to be the victims of stumbling upon a bad gangland brawl and were shot in the process.  It's the 21st century version of "we don't want the cops to get wise to what we're pulling here, see?"  Can't have the whole police force down to bust up MaMa's SLO-MO drug manufacturer-thing, now can we?

So it's a nod to Robocop and not Judge Dredd.  It's still sadly accurate. / Source: motifake.com

There was a rather pointless scene where Gatling cannons were used to wipe out one side of an entire floor of the building after it has been conveniently "locked down" by MaMa's computer hacker guy, that has Dredd running from bullets and everybody else getting mown down.  Silly.  Our bad-guys either don't know how to use their guns (interlocking fields of fire, varying points of aim, moving the barrels just a bit faster than the running speed of the average person), or we just want to see what high-rate-of-fire weapons would do to a building for ten minutes.  It was dumb.

And there is the convenient part where MaMa calls in the corrupt Judges to hunt down their own and kill them.  Dredd and partner get away by violence, but to be honest, by this point my feet had warmed up from being under a blanket, and I started getting drowsy and missing things.  I don't know how the movie ended, but it's a safe bet that Dredd kills MaMa, and he and his partner live happily ever after.  She probably saw this all via her mutant powers anyway.  Would any twists thrown in matter enough for me to care about the precise details of this ending?  Even if you'd killed everybody, including out young blond partner chick, I wouldn't have cared.  And besides, based on the trailer, it looks like Dredd throws MaMa through a window.  SLO-MO her death trip, I'm sure.  Dredd rides off on his motorcycle, either with or without blond partner.  Something trite is said.  Roll credits.  Yawn.

Does anybody understand half of what Sly Stallone is saying in this clip?  I caught the part about him being "da law."  I know where Michael Bay gets his fetish for bright orange explosions and fire.  Movies int he '90s were all about that.

I suppose I'd say that Dredd does what it does fairly effectively, but for this viewer, I just didn't care.  I never read the comics associated with it, though I'd bet this movie is more faithful to the spirit of them than the 1995 effort.  And the action is good, if you like that sort of thing.  I have a theory on action movies of this sort, but I'll not give the whole version of that here.  Suffice it to say that I think the action movie mutated in the late 1990s and is now unable to capture the spirit of what it once was.  That's why movies that bill themselves as '80s action takes don't do as well as the original ones did way back when, and are never as good.  You can't replicate that time, and so you can't replicate the movies of the time.  But everybody is trying.  Too bad, as lots of good ideas are probably not getting green-lit in the process.  Or languishing in what is known colloquially as "Development Hell."  For me, Dredd could have stayed there on the drawing board, and I'd have been just as happy.  It wasn't worth the Redbox fee, in my opinion.  Take that for what it is worth.

Another point-of-view on this:  I took this from IMDb.com's amateur review section of the film's page.  It may sway you better than I could, if you actually like this sort of film.

Perfect Dredd

7 September 2012 | by Lugodoc (United Kingdom)

I'm a huge fan of the comic 2000AD and the character Judge Dredd since 1979, and this film completely satisfied me. They changed all the right things and kept all the right things. Director Pete Travis tackled the problem of filming a comic book by making something that looks nothing like a comic book and more like an action movie shot on location, with a simple linear plot that keeps rolling and never slows down.

Megacity 1 is made markedly less futuristic than the comic in order to become so believable that it is hard to tell where the real slums of Cape Town end and the CGI kilometre high city blocks start. I have an uncomfortable feeling that in less than a hundred years cities like this may actually exist.

The comic Judge's uniform works on paper but can't in real life - giant golden eagles, shoulder pads and bronze name badges hanging off a leather one-piece body suit would sag, wobble and look daft. The movie gives us body armour that looks like it actually gets used whilst keeping the helmet exactly the same. The effect is striking and believable, like everything else in this film.

The plot revolves around a drug which makes time seem to slow down a hundred times, the perfect excuse for scenes of ultra slo-mo explosive bloody (and beautiful) anatomically correct violence that earn this film its 18 rating. Not a kid's movie at all. Every supporting actor looks like they came out of a gang documentary, scarred, nasty, sweaty and mean. Lena Headey totally kicks ass as the ruthless gang lord Ma Ma, calmly relishing the deaths of her enemies, eyes sledging from narcotic addiction.

In a way this is Olivia Thirlby's movie, since she gets the character arc, rookie judge Cassandra Anderson assigned to Dredd for evaluation and finding herself on a very steep learning curve. She is vulnerable, spikey and tough as called for, vital to the movie in order to balance Dredd.

How do you play Dredd? He is the opposite of a character. He has no personal arc, never changes or grows. He has no sense of humour, the comic finds that by placing utterly deadpan 'ol stony- face in ironic situations that reflect off him. And where do you find an actor prepared to wear a helmet obscuring everything but his mouth and chin for the whole 95 minutes? Karl Urban must be a huge fan himself to play the part so right. One reviewer described his performance as "ego-free" and it is. I didn't see Urban anywhere in this movie, all I saw was Dredd.

Me and Dredd-heads everywhere thank you Karl. You smashed it.

The parting comment:

Source: LOLSnaps.com

The caption to this image, when I found it, was: "Woke Up At 530 AM To Find This In The Sink This Is Not My Cat."  A crime has obviously been committed. Call for Judge Dredd.  Or at least Robocop, if the good Judge is not available.