Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
In the future, America is a dystopian wasteland. The latest scourge is Ma-Ma, a prostitute-turned-drug pusher with a dangerous new drug and aims to take over the city. The only possibility of stopping her is an elite group of urban police called Judges, who combine the duties of judge, jury and executioner to deliver a brutal brand of swift justice. But even the top-ranking Judge, Dredd, discovers that taking down Ma-Ma isn’t as easy as it seems in this explosive adaptation of the hugely popular comic series.
Dredd (2012) is a lean, brutal sci-fi action film that wisely strips down the Mega-City One mythology to a contained siege premise. Its cinematography is genuinely exceptional — Roger Deakins served as visual consultant, and the slow-motion 'Slo-Mo' drug sequences are strikingly inventive and beautiful, elevating the film well above its peers. The acting is solid if unspectacular: Karl Urban commits fully to the helmet-never-off Dredd, and Lena Headey is a menacing villain, but neither role demands tremendous range. The plot is functional and efficient — essentially The Raid on a smaller budget — but knowingly so; it doesn't pretend to be more than a tightly constructed action delivery mechanism. Novelty is respectable given its sharp, R-rated refusal to compromise and its distinctive visual identity, though the locked-building premise was hardly original even in 2012. The ending is the weakest element: the resolution of Ma-Ma is abrupt and anticlimactic, and the film simply stops rather than concluding with any real dramatic weight.