Dredd 3D pays faithful tribute to comic
Often in comic book adaptations, the filmmakers seem to have a need to humanize and overcomplicate a character to the point where the audience misses what made the character special in the first place. This ideal doomed the Sylvester Stallone version of Dredd, a film so bad it took Stallone more than a decade to recover.
Rookie investigation· Olivia Thirlby stars in Dredd 3D as Anderson, Dredd’s telekinetic sidekick. Though the unheroic characters don’t develop much during the film, Dredd remains true to the original source material. – | Photo courtesy of Lionsgate Publicity
Dredd 3D, however, sticks to the basics and delivers an unadulterated and concise action-thriller with plenty of violence and gore. Directed by Pete Travis and written by 28 Days Later scribe Alex Garland, the film corrects nearly everything that the 1995 Stallone version did wrong and stands on its own as an solid piece of entertainment.
The Judge Dredd character, originally designed by John Wager and Carlos Ezquerra, evolved from a satirical short story of America’s obsession with vigilantism into a three-decade-long sci-fi epic about fascism, class warfare and the ramifications of blind judgment.
The film adaptation takes place in a post-apocalyptic America in a gigantic metropolis called Mega-City One, where law enforcers act as judges, juries and executioners, able to deliver justice swiftly and without discretion.
Exemplifying this draconian method is Judge Joe Dredd, played by Karl Urban, who maintains a constant scowl and grizzled Clint Eastwood-like demeanor. In the spirit of the source material, the character represents justice and law on a monomaniacal scale and never takes off his helmet or his uniform. He doesn’t behave this way out of joy or honor or even for personal reasons: He just believes, more than anything, that he is the law and that it’s his purpose in life to judge others.
Dredd partners up with a rookie judge named Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), who has a limited form of telekinesis. The two investigate a series of drug-related murders in a towering slum. Ma-Ma (Lena Headey), a notorious drug lord, rules the slum and peddles SLO-MO, an experimental drug which manipulates a person’s perception of time.
When they arrest one of her lieutenants, Ma-Ma locks down the building, trapping Dredd and Anderson with villanous thugs and residents out for their heads. One might be reminded of Die Hard or the recent foreign action film The Raid: Redemption, but it’s actually refreshing to see a comic book adaptation that doesn’t have to have an end-of-the-world plot device.
The script never glorifies Dredd’s questionable and arguably unheroic actions, and that’s ultimately the point of the character: He’s a man who takes no joy in what he does and ends up becoming strangely admirable in his near-fascist attitude.
The well-edited action sequences and tightness of the script keeps the film intense and zipping along nicely without dragging. The South African locations used in the film also adds an unique environment and the 3-D filmmaking, while a bit overboard, leads to some memorable sequences. That’s especially the case in scenes involving the drug SLO-MO, in which the film cranks up in frame rate and saturation to a candy-colored symphony of carnage.
It’s not a complex piece of filmmaking, however; the characters don’t evolve and there’s really no plot development. If anything, the fact that everything remains as bleak in the end as it does in the beginning seems intentional. Still, it doesn’t seem to hurt that Dredd 3D is very accessible to anyone who hasn’t read the comics.
But while this simple approach is appreciated, it’s a little disappointing that the more absurd details from the source material, like the cybernetic Angel Gang or the dimension-hopping Dark Judges, aren’t present. Dredd 3D features the gritty realism of District 9 more so than the gunmetal hyperbole of Warhammer 40,000, although in this case the approach works in keeping the film grounded and more appealing to people who have no idea who Dredd is or don’t remember Stallone struggling to say “I am the law” properly.
Dredd 3D is an amoral and bleak experience to the very end, but that’s why it works so well. It keeps to the spirit of the original Dredd character and doesn’t use a cheeky ironic approach. It never feels like the filmmakers are winking at the audience; Instead, they fully commit to the extreme form of justice that the judge dishes out — without questioning his method.