8:08 a.m. - 2013-01-27
DREDD (2012(
Rented Dredd last night: the new one with Karl Urban instead of Sylvester Stallone. Dredd 2012 is not a sequel to the 1995 movie, though it is based on the same comic book series. I've always like Karl Urban, who is so good at creating characters with an edge: McCoy in the new cast Star Trek, the assassin in The Bourne Supremacy, the government agent in REDS who fought with Bruce Willis. But in Dredd Urban's face is concealed throughout the movie by a visored helmet. He doesn't even take it off to mop the sweat off his brow after blowing away countless bad guys. And he talks in a low, Christian-Bale-as-Batman growl that could be just about any male voice. I didn't realize that I had been watching one of my favorite actors until the credits rolled.

Olivia Thirlby, so perfect as Leah in the Juno movie, was much more subdued in Dredd, in keeping with her role as a rookie Judge being evaluated by the experienced Dredd. Her Training Day makes Ethan Hawke's look like a walk in the park. Lena Headey, best know for playing Sara Connor in the TV series and as Queen Gorgo in 300, was also difficult to recognize because of a scarred face and dry, fly away hair, but she did a good job as the cold-blooded gang leader Ma-Ma.

Probably 90 per cent of the movie takes place in a 200-story vertical slum that the criminals manage to shut down, effectively trapping Dredd and his trainee inside. Then it's a 2-hour shootout with more than enough blood, guts and torture to go around. Ma-Ma and her minions don't just skin you alive; first they give you a hallucinatory drug that makes your perception of time slow way way down, effectively prolonging the torture.

Sorry to see that some of the police could be bribed; I'd have thought that psychological profiling--and maybe even financial compensation--would have been more advanced, even in a dystopian future. And once again we see the police outgunned, when Ma-Ma has her gang open up with THREE min-guns on the two Judges. Guess that assault rifle law never made it through Congress.

For me the best part of the movie was the setting: a post-apocalypse high-rise slum that houses thousands of criminals and the poor people whom they prey on. It was photographed in a nice mixture of dark and light that looked like a backstreet lit only by fizzling neon. Definitely a Ridley Scott influence there.

Overall not a great scifi movie but an enjoyable one. If only I had known I was watching Urban!

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