Drawn to Cinema Season: Dredd (Dir Pete Travis, 1h30m, 2012)

Dredd (US 3D release poster)

In late February 1977, those reading the first issue of the British comic, 2000AD, would have come face to face with an advert; a motorbike ridden by a helmeted rider, announcing, in bold stencilled text, the arrival, in the next issue of a character who would become synonymous with this cornerstone of the New Wave of British Comics. This wave would bring Messrs Moore, Morrison, Gaiman, and more to the States, reinvent the comic book, as the graphic novel, and appeal to a serious, discerning adult audience, consequently creating a franchise that encompasses audio drama, video games, novels, and two feature films. The second of these films, we focus on today. His name is Judge Dredd (played by Karl Urban), and he is The Law.

Judge Joseph Dredd had been here before. 1995 brought us the visually impressive but otherwise hollow Judge Dredd (Dir Danny Cannon), in which Sylvester Stallone plays the titular law-man. Judge Dredd is a mess. The film's editing is far more violent and brutal than anything on screen. Furthermore, someone decided that Dredd needed a comic foil in the form of Rob Schneider's unfunny con, the plot haphazardly sews several stories from the comic together in a lopsided 'greatest hits' compilation, and worse, and most infamously for a character who has legendarily rarely appeared helmetless and never appeared with his face unobscured in the nearly half century of the comic, Stallone spends much of the film bareheaded. In a decade of increasingly mixed comic book adaptions, Judge Dredd is amongst the worst.

Dredd (Karl Urban) surveys the scene

Dredd immediately proves itself to be the opposite of this. Gone are the Art Deco and more outlandish science-fiction elements, from Versace-designed, shoulder-padded uniform downward. This is a gritty rendition of Dredd, harking back to his punk 1970s inner city influenced beginnings, and this visual grounding in this grungy science-fiction rendering of Mega City One, using Johannesburg and Cape Town, perfectly sets the scene. This is not the Blade Runner-inspired landscape of skyscrapers and Gothic pediments of the first Judge Dredd film, this is a dystopian world, and also a extremely violent one. Dredd is introduced in pursuit of a minivan of criminals driving under the influence of dangerous, if aesthetically stunning, drug, Slo-Mo, leaves the user seeing the world at 1/100th speed, who mow down a pedestrian in brutal fashion and soon meet a bloody and spectacular end in a high-speed crash

Dredd, in short, is a perfect foil for this brutal, run down, and we soon learn, post-apocalyptic world; Urban's performance, and Alex Garland's script-the jury remains out as to how much of the directorial process Garland was ultimately responsible for-have a gritty efficiency. Far from the shining lantern-jawed Stallone, Urban's Dredd is more grounded-a tough, ruthless, Eastwood-style anti-hero, essentially riding into town to dispense brutal, but often deserved justice against hardened criminals, but has moments of bleak humour, and many of his actions are underpinned by his inate sense of justice. Before heading out on his duties, however, Dredd is saddled with telepath Cassandra Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), the would-be first psychic to join the Judges, with a tragic childhood and a single day to prove her qualities as an officer.

Judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) and Dredd prepare for battle.

Against this duo is ranged Peach Trees, a colossal towerblock that has fallen into lawlessness, now largely controlled by the brutal Ma-Ma gang, led by Ma-Ma (a vicious Lena Headey), who now controls the entire tower block. With their execution of three members of a rival gang attracting Dredd and Anderson's attention-the film wastes no expense on the scale of the set of the common space of Peach Trees, nor on the gory aesthetics-and the film leaps into action. The block is summarily locked down by one of Ma-Ma's subordinates, Domhnall Gleeson's jittery computer specialist, and so Dredd and Anderson find themselves trapped, and with the block hunting them down, so they begin their slow, brutal, and bullet-riddled journey up the tower block.

Not unlike a videogame, there are set-pieces staked through the film, ranging from a raid on the drug den on one of the two hundreds floors, to a seriously bloody moment in which Ma-Ma, determined to kill the duo of judges, has her men open fire with machine guns, massacring an entire floor of residents, only for them to escape. Thee final third of the film, sees our duo separated, both Dredd, finding himself unexpectedly vulnerable, and Anderson, seemingly held hostage by Ma-Ma's gang, working together in a bruising, and unexpectedly, bleakly funny, series of set-pieces to defeat her, and an ever-increasing rogue's gallery of drug dealers, gun runners, heavily armed youths and more besides. Each battle, each encounter, has its narrative purpose, is well paced, and shot, and has, throughout it, a sense of momentum, a perfect cinematic mechanism set to work.

Dredd throws its titular hero into a grounded gritty, and spectacularly violent world

Dredd is undoubtedly the better Judge Dredd movie. This isn't so much a bar for the film to leap over as it is a tripwire to hop-don't make Mega City One too shiny, have the requisite blood, gristle, gore and viscera, and for Tharg's sake (the eternal, semi-fictional editor of 2000AD), don't have him remove his helmet. Dredd, though, goes further: it's not beholden to any one story arc, but uses the world of Judge Dredd to tell a compelling and gruesomely fun tale of the titular Judge, and his first encounter with Judge Anderson. Even for those discovering the anti-heroic law-man for the first time, the film is nothing short of a perfect introduction to him, and a well-wrought slice of action sci-fi. 

Rating: Highly Recommended

Dredd is available to stream via Amazon Prime, and on DVD and BluRay from  ‎Entertainment in Video. It is also currently available via Peacock Premium and on DVD and BluRay from Lionsgate in the US.

Next week, our final issue of graphic novel adaptions for now as we consider Zack Snyder's adaption of the legendary Watchmen.

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