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| "These shades are awesome. You've got to get a pair." |
Grade: B+
We haven't seen a superhero movie like Dredd in a while, but hopefully there will be a lot more like it. Not more reboots or 3D cash grabs, but more comic adaptations that eschew the origin formula and jumps right into telling stories about heroes in progress. Also, Dredd may signal the beginning of a time where superhero movies are no longer seen as a genre to themselves but more of a flashy variation on the standard action movie, a move that will only further cement their already undeniable mainstream appeal.
Dredd may not be perfect, but it's one of the most effective reboots of any franchise this side of Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy. Dumping all the overcooked, over-designed, over-the-top hullabaloo of the 1995 big screen adaptation starring Sylvester "I EM DE LAW" Stallone, director Peter Travis' Dredd brings the character closer to his roots as one of the Judges--spartan cops who act as judge, jury, and executioner--of post-apocalyptic megalopolis, MegaCity 1. Rather than adapting Dredd's origin or the story of his battle against his greatest foe, Travis opts to tell the tale of Dredd (Karl Urban) and psychic rookie Judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), as they find themselves trapped inside a 200-story tenement in the MegaCity slums after a bust gone wrong. Dredd and Anderson raise the ire of drug kingpin MaMa (Lena Headey), who has been flooding the streets of MegaCity 1 with a designer drug called SLO-MO that, rather pointedly, makes users fell like time is slowing to a crawl, when they arrest one of her top lieutenants for his part in a gruesome triple homicide. Locked in the tenement building with no backup and no place to go but up, Dredd and Anderson must find a way to outwit a veritable army of drug-adled psychopaths before they become the latest victims of MaMa's violent power grab.
Yes, Dredd sounds exactly like The Raid, or any variation on Die Hard for that matter, but that's the beauty of the interesting "little" movie. It aspires to do what superhero comics have done for the longest time: graft superhero tropes onto an existing narrative structure in an effort to add a new wrinkle and a little bit of razzle dazzle to a staid genre. As much as Dredd appears to ape The Raid or other more famous actioners, it still possess enough uniqueness to seem backwardly revolutionary. For one thing, Dredd indulges in a level of ultraviolence that rivals the Raid in artistry but nearly surpasses Gareth Edwards' instant classic in sheer gruesomeness. Within the first five minutes, as there at least three ridiculously bloody deaths and the body count continues rise in increasingly gory ways throughout the flicks' tight 95 minute runtime. While the violence is over the top, the design of the world is earthy, dirty, and far removed from the candy-coated "grimness" of the '95 movie, where MegaCity 1 looked more like a super-sized Times Square instead of a dusty, uninhabitable slum.
That reach for naturalism extends to the performances in Dredd, with Urban, Thirlby, and Headey avoiding theatrics and significant scenery chewing in favor of something resembling subtlety and nuance. Granted, the actors in Dredd still deliver lines with the bombastic aplomb required of any action or superhero movie, but their delivery is nothing compared to goofy, on-the-nose exchanges found in the earlier movie. Even when Urban's Dredd announces that he "is the law," it is a line executed with purpose and a degree of menace that is far more threatening than posturing. As much as the changes in the performances and visual design reflect the propensity for "realism" in today's superhero flicks, neither appears to be the result of a desire by Travis or the cast to make the flick "real" for the sake of coolness (although it's very likely) but more for a basic respect for the material and a desire to make the spectacular shine against a, relatively, realistic backdrop.
Ultimately, Dredd succeeds because Travis and his cohorts seem to believe that this story is not inherently silly, and they treat it as such not by ditching the fantastic elements but by thoughtfully grafting them onto one of the most reliable templates of the genre. Sure, Dredd is not the deepest superhero flick, as it only tangentially references the issues of class struggles that could potentially exist in a teeming megalopolis where space and resources are clearly limited. Even the action in Dredd appears a bit slower paced in the shadow of the Raid, but that does not take away from the palpable tension and suspense that builds steadily once the Judges enter the PeachTrees tenement. With an admittedly B-movie plot and structure centered around a hero with little cache among American audiences, Dredd may seem like a total afterthought. But, it deserves to be so much more than that. If it does well this weekend, it could show the studios that not every superhero movie has to be the first Spider-Man, and it could give birth to a resurgence of mid-range action flicks that dress reliable narratives in superhero skin, thus making an experience that satisfies both new and old fans of action and superhero flicks.
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