Dredd

[Mr Wallstreet]

I saw the DVD for the new Judge Dredd movie starring Karl Urban and it was a, surprisingly, great film.

The only exposure I’ve had to Judge Dredd is a handful of Batman/Judge Dredd crossovers and the 1995 film starring Stallone. The crossovers with Batman were average - standard crossover fare; two heroes meet; have a misunderstanding; fighting ensues then they team up to fight the bad guy (except Batman loses to Dredd in the initial fight! OMG WTF). The Stallone Judge Dredd film was more a Stallone action movie than a Judge Dredd movie; in that you could’ve replaced the Judge character/costume for a generic police officer uniform and it wouldn’t have made a difference story-wise

Seeing this film from an almost non-comic fans view, Karl Urban’s Judge Dredd seemed a lot closer to what the comic version seems to be. Right off the bat, Urban’s Dredd looked tougher and more dangerous; his voice wasn’t deep and clear, it was rougher and ragged. Throughout the film so you only saw Dredd’s scowl and five o’clock shadow but just from those and his posture he looked meaner. Overall Dredd looked he had a lot more mileage on him. All the changes I just mentioned weren’t big changes at all but many small changes that made Dredd seem like almost different character.

The story itself was nothing special: a veteran office teamed up with a rookie to see if she’s got what it takes, like Training Day. A lot of times these types of stories take one of two shitty turns: they either become buddy cop films where there are a lot of stupid jokes and bad one liners or they turn into Good Cop/Bad Cop films where one officer (usually the older officer) plays the straight cop and the younger cop plays the loose cannon. Thankfully, Dredd avoids both those tropes by playing it straight from the get-go.

A huge chunk of what made this movie so enjoyable wasn’t that it was about 2 partners uncovering a vast conspiracy of lies & deceit or high ranking political corruption or toppling the government. It was about a drug war. The scale of the story was comparable to its protagonists. It didn’t try and overcompensate by having a large and unwieldy story. Almost every comic book film tries to have the heroes save the world or stop a bomb from going off. Dredd & Anderson were content to make an arrest and solve a case.

The film also threw a few unexpected two twists my way. I kept expecting the female trainee to come off as a stereotypical “Hollywood femaleâ€￾ who would wind up either playing the empowered liability, damsel in distress, or annoying liberal advocate of non-violence towards criminals. Surprisingly she only came off as “kinda damsel in distressâ€￾ wherein she got caught but was able to rescue herself.

This is not to say the film was perfect, it had a few flaws, but none so glaring in the grand scheme of things that I feel the need to list them.

This was a greatly improved over the last film.

[wolf_2099]

I loved this movie.
Huge man boner.

[XIII]

I need to see this!

[Mr Wallstreet]

His boner?

[jedispyder]

Geek Chub?

It was definitely a great movie, I was surprised by how great the quality was for it's not so high budget. I think it just came out at the wrong time of the year, that it would have been more suited for Autumn instead of Summer.