Tell it to the Judge, dirtbags
Dredd 3D ★★★ 1/2
Starring: Karl Urban, Olivia Thirlby, Lena Headey Playing in English at Banque Scotia, Cavendish, Colossus, Kirkland, Lacordaire, LaSalle, Marché Central, Sources, Sphèretech, Taschereau cinemas Parents’ guide: Extreme violence, coarse language
In the futuristic dystopian thriller Dredd 3D, the villain — a scarred ex-hooker named Ma-Ma, played with much heartless sneering by Lena Headey — is manufacturing a futuristic dystopian drug called Slo-Mo.
It gives users the sensation of time slowing down, as if they’ve had Essence of Sam Peckinpah injected into their veins, and when they take it, the screen goes all psychedelic with three-dimensional spots of light and coloured puffs of smoke floating lazily over the auditorium.
It’s an ingenious way to combine the laid-back haze of tetrahydrocannabinol into the movie, not to mention that lazy float of druggie time that all the best futuristic dystopian movies are featuring these days. It’s The Matrix with pot.
This particular futuristic dystopia is familiar to readers of the Judge Dredd comics (and probably not to viewers of the lesser 1995 film with Sylves- ter Stallone).
In Mega-City One, a future metropolis of 800 million, the law is enforced by a squadron of coldly efficient police called judges, who also carry out the roles of jury and executioner. They wear RoboCop leathers and fearsome helmets, carry computerized weapons that fire by voice command, and ride supersized motorbikes. You can’t see their eyes, but judging by their curled lips they don’t go in much for things like “plea bargaining” and “mercy.”
The most unconquerable of all is Judge Dredd (Karl Urban), an unadorned crimefighter who speaks with the no-nonsense rasp of Clint Eastwood. “Do you require backup?” a dispatcher asks as Dredd chases a car filled with narcotics through the bleak, dystopian streets. “No,” he says, a stripped-down croak that tells you all you need to know about his brutal self-sufficiency.
All this is just buildup to the devilishly simple plot of Dredd 3D, a plot that would seem even more devilish if it wasn’t a near copy of the breathtaking 2011 action film The Raid: Redemption. In both films, police enter a concrete-and-steel highrise run by an army of wellarmed gangsters and race up and down stairways, creating carnage. The Raid was a purer version of the story, but Dredd 3D — or, as I like to think of it, Dreddd — has the advantage of Urban’s be-helmeted stoicism and the occasional break in the non-stop bloodshed for some Slo-Mo 3-D floating.
Dredd is accompanied by his new partner, a rookie named Anderson (Olivia Trilby) who has psychic abilities. They come in handy when she has to read the mind of perps and Dredd is taking too long beating the information out of him.
Dredd and Anderson are called to the Peach Tree, an enormous highrise that’s a combination high-security prison and public housing. MaMa has just killed three underlings by skinning them alive and throwing them off the 39thfloor balcony, interrupting the shopping concourse below. The judges suspect foul play.
The guns start blazing and pretty well continue for the next hour and a half as Dredd and Anderson stalk the halls, sneak up and down on elevators and ambush the hordes of grungy assassins that Ma-Ma dispatches.
Most of Dredd 3D takes place in the confines of the building, a vast space that director Pete Travis shoots up with bombs, giant machine guns, stun grenades and the rest of the futuristic lawman’s armoury.
The judges have a prisoner they have to drag along, a henchman named Kay (Wood Harris) who’s a witness to MaMa’s crimes. Anderson uses her psychic powers to enter his brain. “It’s kind of empty in here,” she notes, a line that constitutes the entire comic relief of Dredd 3D, unless you count the amusingly relentless anger of Judge Dredd himself.
He’s an action hero whose very lack of charisma makes him electrifying, a tabula rasa of futuristic crabbiness. He’ll wear well if Dredd turns into a franchise. He should bring some Slo-Mo with him on his next adventure, just in case.