BEFORE: It's not just another sci-fi film with a last name for a title, Karl Urban also carries over from "Riddick". As long as I'm dealing with comic-book heroes this week, might as well take advantage of the linking and work this one in. Tomorrow's film will therefore be both obvious and difficult to link to.
THE PLOT: In a violent, futuristic city where the police have the authority to act as judge, jury and executioner, a cop teams with a trainee to take down a gang that deals the reality-altering drug, SLO-MO.
AFTER: A lot of times, a screenwriter wants to have things both ways - like having a character (essentially) say, "I can't possibly even consider a relationship right now, for reasons X, Y and Z. Don't even go there. Wanna make out?" Or depicting a planet that is desolate, deserted, no signs of life. Except for all of the animals and the bounty hunter waystation that's just over the ridge.
"Dredd" is nothing but 2-way contradictions in its premise. It's set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, as long as you don't count the 80 million people living in the greater metropolitan Bos-Wash area. Yeah, that's a Mega City that covers half of the East Coast, so I wonder if the writer ever took the time to look up the definition of "post-apocalyptic". Jeez, for an irradiated wasteland, things aren't looking all that bad - I mean, somebody had the resources to build 200-story buildings, so things must have been OK at some point, right? Next we're supposed to believe that criminals and gangs are thriving, and civilians are all afraid of the streets - except we're shown hundreds of them walking around, and they don't look all that fearful to me.
And the Judges, like Judge Dredd, are the only thing fighting back, the last line of defense in a corrupt world. And you can count on them 100%. Umm, except for the corrupt ones. And even at their best, they can only respond to 6% of the crimes reported. And their jurisdiction only extends so far, so I guess even with their help, humanity's in more trouble than it realizes.
OK, so someone projected their thoughts about the present, to calculate the future, I've seen it happen again and again. But that's always a losing game - who could have foreseen the things in our present, like Twitter and ISIS and the fights over gay marriage? It's like someone took a walk around Detroit and said, "Hey, imagine the whole world looking like this..." without really parsing it out. I mean, the majority of our country consists of beautiful rolling hills or grassy farmlands, but apparently hardly anybody wants to live there. Why stay in Detroit after you've gotten a glimpse of, say, Wyoming or Montana? Because they may be beautiful, but I'm betting they're also boring as hell.
A story where most of the crime is drug-related also seems a little outdated for 2013. With pot legal in some states, why not just take a vacation there, get a little natural herbal entertainment, instead of those synthetic chemicals shot up into your veins? The drug of choice in the future is SLO-MO, which slows you all down, presumably so you can enjoy the effects longer, plus it gives its users the euphoria associated with being in a much better sci-fi movie, like that one "Matrix" film that was pretty neat. Remember when everything slowed into "bullet time"? Yeah, that was cool. But here comes a NITPICK POINT: for drugs to make everything else seem slower, they'd have to speed your metabolism way up, right? But that's not what we're shown here - so I guess someone figured out drugs that work the opposite way, or else again, the screenwriter just forgot to research the way things work.
The story here is very simple - veteran cop takes a rookie cop out on patrol on her first day. And instead of dealing with the big picture, they take on the small picture, just one building out of hundreds, meant to be representative of the problems of Mega City, I guess. But it almost seems too small and too short, I didn't get any feeling of grandness out of it, or a sense that these judges are making a difference in the world.
There's been a disturbing trend in the world of special effects in the last few years, and that's the practice of "showing off" by depicting collapsing buildings - somebody figured out the mathematics of it all, and used that to great extent in films like "Man of Steel" and both "Avengers" films. This could be a sad remnant of the collective unconscious after 9/11 - that image got burned into all of our brains, and filmmakers have been churning it back out at us, even if they're not aware that's what they're doing. I'm sure there are dozens more films that have used this technique, like "Cloverfield", "2012" and probably that recent "Godzilla" film - eventually the FX guys will discover something new, but I wish they'd find a way to stop this sooner. "Dredd" is one of the rare films that doesn't exploit this effect, but I'm guessing it's probably more of a cost-cutting measure than any respect for a national tragedy.
Another quibble is that with several characters wearing the same outfits, and also helmets that cover most of their faces, it was very difficult for me to tell who was who at certain times. In a firefight, a viewer really needs to know who to root for - and did our hero just take a hit, or was that another guy dressed exactly like him?
Also starring Lena Headey (last seen in "The Remains of the Day"), Olivia Thirlby (last seen in "No Strings Attached"), Rakie Ayola, Wood Harris, Domnhall Gleason (last seen in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2"), Jason Cope.
RATING: 3 out of 10 blast shields
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