Director: Pete Travis
MPAA Rating: R
Film Pulse Score: 7/10
When I first began reporting on Dredd 3D, the reboot of the 1995 Stallone flop, I saw just another studio cash grab, and another bad film. While I pride myself in having a pretty good handle on predicting the quality of a movie, in this case I was sorely mistaken. The marketing team would have you believe this is some big budget action film that boasts sci-fi themes with little to no substance. The trailer was full of over stylized camera work and cheesy one-liners. While some of this is true, in actuality this is a low-budget British/South African production that looks grittier and darker than any run of the mill sci-fi flick.
Dredd 3D stars Karl Urban as Judge Dredd, a futuristic law enforcer who gets charged with taking on, and evaluating a new recruit, played by Olivia Thirlby. While she underperformed on her tests, she has a strong psychic ability, which the higher ups want to use to help fight the escalating crime in the city. While investigating a triple homicide, the two judges become trapped in a 200-story apartment building controlled by the evil drug kingpin Ma-Ma (Lena Headey), and need to fight their way out.
If this story sounds familiar, it’s because it is eerily similar to The Raid, even though production began on this film first. It’s a very basic plot that keeps itself contained and concise. Nearly the entire film takes place in this dilapidated building filled with scuzzy looking drug dealers and gang bangers. It is nice to know that even in the future, junkies still look like the strung out tweakers we know today.
The drug aspect does play a fairly large part in this film as well. The malevolent characters in the apartment building deal and use a drug called SLO MO, that enables the user to feel as if time is moving by at a slower pace. This drug, and the explanation of it’s effects, act as nothing more than a plot device, so that we the viewer can see some amazing slow motion visual effects.
These effects look amazing and add a certain amount of beauty to the otherwise ugly looking backdrop. Seeing someone have a bullet blow through one side of their face and out the other, is oddly mesmerizing when seeing it in super slow motion. When this effect is shown in the trailer, it looks tacked on and gimmicky, but in the context of the film, it feels like just another element to push this movie over the top even further.
It’s this over the top nature of the film that extends it high above the original. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it knows exactly what it wants to be. The violence is through the charts, and will make even the most die-hard gore fans cringe with delight. Mixed in, we have spurts of comedy, with several humorous lines of dialogue, which have varying degrees of success. Karl Urban’s deadpan humor was a good fit for the character of Dredd, however his inconsistent “Batman” voice was problematic. Sometimes you laugh because it was a genuinely funny line, and sometimes you laugh because it was horrible.
It’s extremely rare to have a franchise reboot and have it actually work, but against all odds, in this case, Dredd 3D comes off as not only surpassing the crap-fest that was the first film, but somehow makes itself a solid sci-fi flick as well. I never thought I would say this, but I would be very happy to see more come from this franchise, as long as the tone and visuals remained the same. It’s a film that feels like it has indie roots, and it’s a nice departure from the slick, CG-looking science fiction that we’ve been getting lately. It’s just unfortunate that this had to come out so close to The Raid. That, coupled with the fact that it’s associated with the Stallone failure will probably hurt the film in the long run, but it’s still worth checking out if you’re in the mood to just have some bloody good fun.
