The Sylvester Stallone fascist police-state movies were bad enough the first time. Do they really think they’re fooling us by calling the remake “Dredd” instead of “Judge Dredd”? What’s next, “Cobra 2.0”?
“Dredd,” this time starring Karl Urban’s mouth instead of Stallone’s, begins in a scary future where in a single neighborhood you can come across 96 percent unemployment. That part I can believe — I work in the newspaper industry — but I wondered whether the judicial policemen of the future quite have the right idea in dealing with all of this misery by shooting everyone in sight.
Dredd is a judge, jury and executioner who operates under the aegis of a vaguely Third Reich-ish eagle with a visor concealing most of his face. Justice is supposed to be blind, but in this case I think what the Law really wants is unaccountability. Maybe this movie will be a big hit at police conventions.
We are asked to believe Dredd and Co. are all that stands between us and chaos, but the chief crime of the evildoers seems principally to be that they like to smoke a drug called “slo-mo” that makes time pass at 1 percent of its actual speed (or four times as fast as this thudding, repetitive movie).
In the opening, Dredd pursues a van containing three miscreants who, in trying to escape him, accidentally kill a pedestrian, which according to Dredd bumps their status up from “wanted men” to “should be shot on sight.” Manslaughter equals instant death sentence? Never mind. When in doubt, use excessive force.
Dredd’s partner for the day is a blond psychic named Anderson (indie-chick Olivia Thirlby — sellout!) who tags along for an evaluation that will determine whether she, too, can earn the right to shoot anyone she pleases. Anderson can’t wear a helmet — it interferes with her psychic powers, she explains, though viewers may notice that a helmet might interfere even more with her movie-star powers.
For an hour or so of screen time, the two partners blast their way through a vertical slum that is dominated by the drug gang the Ma-Ma clan, named for its boss (Lena Headey), a scar-faced ex-prostitute.
The super-slow motion deployed by director Pete Travis to illustrate the effects of the drug is the sole interesting feature of the movie. Taking a bath, Ma-Ma luxuriates in every drop, and when punishing her enemies, she first gives them a hit of the drug (with an asthma inhaler), then tosses them out of the building for extra terror value. To us, though, falling slowly looks beautifully vivid and serene.
The rest is relatively straightforward. My notes are as follows: “Shoot bad guy.” “Shoot bad guy.” “Shoot bad guy.” There’s a climactic confrontation with Ma-Ma that isn’t very climactic, and some corrupt judges work against our heroes, but it’s hard to care which faceless authoritarian maniac shoots which faceless authoritarian maniac. All I wanted to do was escape from this aggressively ugly world and its equally unattractive characters. It’s not that the movie is in bad taste or cheesy (though it is) but that all of its hyperviolence adds up to nothing: This thing is dedd.
