Review of Dredd (2012) by Ash B — 17 Feb 2014

Hands down the best genre film of 2012!

After a summer of generally mediocre and unremarkable blockbusters, it took a mid-budget, independent, comic book adaptation to generate any excitement.

And what an exhilarating and exciting movie Dredd turned out to be-more than living up to its classic comic book source material, no mean feat in itself.

Dredd (2012) gets everything right that the 1995 movie iteration of the character got so spectacularly wrong.

Dredd is a refreshingly adult piece of filmmaking-brutal, dark and with a razor sharp vein of black humour running through it and is pretty much the opposite of what Hollywood churns out today.

Dredd is old school filmmaking at its best and reminiscent of many of the classic 80's dystopian sci-fi movies of the past, such as Mad Max II and Escape From New York, and is really not to be missed by fans of such films.

The performances are uniformly excellent. Karl Urban perfectly embodies the cold, almost machine like character of Judge Dredd and Urban is matched by his co-star, Olivia Thirlby, who gives a remarkably committed performance, as rookie Judge Anderson.

Your protagonists are only as good as your antagonist. And luckily with Lena Headey, playing Ma-Ma, they have their equal as she depicts a brutally ruthless individual, that is also a strangely sympathetic one. Not an easy juggling act to pull off.

The film is visually striking with an effective (read subtle) use of 3D that never overshadows what is effectively a high octane and sharply written character study from director Peter Travis and writer Alex Garland.

If, like me, you miss the days when films weren't just an excuse for increasingly overblown and redundant uses of CGI and in service of an actor's ego, at the expense of a compelling narrative, then Dredd is the film for you and should be ordered without hesitation.