The conceit of this fascist futurist pessimism involves the
law officers of this concrete wasteland of high-tech weaponry and low-tech
social unrest. They’re known as judges, but really they serve as judge, jury,
and executioner. They wear tight leather suits with dull gold badges and heavy
helmets with dark shaded visors that obscure the eyes entirely, the better to fix
a gaze unknowable at their impending victims while fiddling with
voice-activated guns that can shoot all manner of projectiles. They’re
basically Robocop without the winning personality.
Our hero, such as he is, is known as Judge Dredd, of course.
He’s played by Karl Urban who, after playing charismatic supporting characters
in all sorts of sci-fi and fantasy blockbusters from The Lord of the Rings to Star
Trek, uses his leading role to speak all of his lines in a growly monotone.
Even when he gets to utter the character’s famous tagline, such as it is, his
line reading of “I am the law!” feels
strangely underplayed. Still, he fills the suit and seems menacing enough, I
suppose. The plot concerns one day in the life of this futuristic lawman. He’s
given the task of letting a pretty young psychic (Olivia Thirlby) tag along.
She applied to be a Judge, but failed the exam by only three points. Why a
psychic would fail an exam is beyond me, but that’s the case. Anyways, the
higher-ups give her the opportunity to go out judging with Dredd and see if she
can perform in the field.
It’s a bad day for that. A routine drug bust in a
200-stories-high slum goes horribly wrong when the tough gang leader who runs
the building (Lena Headey) decides she’d rather not have her drug-dealing
operation discovered. She puts the tenement-turned-headquarters in lockdown and
orders her underlings to kill her some judges. When this happens, the psychic
asks Dredd “What’s going on?” You think she of all people would know. If you
saw the action film The Raid: Redemption
earlier this year, you’ll recognize the broad strokes of this movie. The two
movies are built upon essentially the same shootout-up-and-down-a-skyscraper
structure, although this time around there are way more future guns and little
to no martial arts.
The movie’s best visual trick is the representation of the
high offered by the gang’s future-drug. It’s called Slo-Mo and makes the user
feel like time has slowed to a crawl. Travis and Mantle use it as an almost
clever riff on modern action filmmaking’s love of using slow motion to amp up
would-be super-cool moments. When a character plummets from a large height and
falls very slowly for a very long time, it’s a funny little visual flourish.
Unfortunately, that’s the best the film has to offer. The rest of the time,
it’s just running and gunning in ways that quickly grow tiresome. Rather than
using the plot’s confinement to the advantage of the fight choreography, the
whole thing grows dimmer and uglier as it goes along. The violence is amped up
beyond all reason, especially when it spills out in grotesque slow motion
splatters. The terse characters grow only more uncommunicative and monosyllabic
finding less and less time for their flat exposition and unworkable one-liners.
Now, I’ve never read the original comic books about Judge
Dredd, but based on the evidence of two films now, maybe he just doesn’t work
cinematically. The world is interesting, a wasteland of brutality and mutation
that’s held barely in check by a brutal police state. And yet Dredd himself
comes across as such a dud. He’s a bland action figure posing his way through
feats of elaborate CGI violence and destruction. Stallone’s version was too
goofy and nonsensical. This time around it’s way too dour, with monotone
simplicity taking the place of narrative interest and characterization of more
than the barest kind. The concept screams for propulsion, but at its core this movie’s
all about slowing things down and taking it to its lowest possible levels of
simplicity. It should work far better than it does.
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