Forget Stallone, Kiwi Karl Urban showed he was a perfect fit for big screen Judge Dredd
Back in 1977, naming a comic book 2000 AD probably seemed like a safe bet. No-one imagined that the publication would last long and the figure was a convenient shorthand for sci-fi and futuristic shenanigans.
Forty-five years on, 2000 AD is still a thing. And that is in large part due to Judge Dredd, who appeared in issue two and became the comic’s superstar. (Strontium Dog fans, fight me.)
Dredd is a lawman in the early 22nd century. His beat is MegaCity One – the North Eastern seaboard of today’s USA – now surrounded by high walls and irradiated wastelands.
Unemployment is at 95 per cent, drug use is rampant and nihilism is the mood. The population live mostly in 200-storey blocks, which periodically go to war with each other. It’s a tough place to be a cop.
In print, Dredd is a fascistic anti-hero with an unbendable moral code, but a complete belief in his own right to execute ‘‘perps’’ on the spot. Creator John Wagner conceived Dredd as a mordant, satiric, Man-With-No-Name for a modern age. In Thatcher’s Britain – and around the world – Dredd became an icon.
Unless of course, you were Sylvester Stallone, in which case you missed the point, misunderstood the character and starred in an absolutely bloody awful screen adaptation in 1995, which tanked so badly it killed off the idea of a Judge Dredd movie for more than a decade.
But in 2012, another film arrived, simply called Dredd. And boy, was it great.
Local lad Karl Urban had exactly the chin and the presence to play the lead – and the script, from fanboy Alex Garland (28 Days Later, The Beach) eschewed any origin-myth pretensions.
Dredd simply follows one bad day at the office, as Dredd assesses a rookie judge and gets trapped in a block full of villains who want them dead. Director Pete Travis (Vantage Point) took a medium budget and turned in an epic.
Urban is superlative, Olivia Thirlby is great as rookie Anderson – though the script does her no favours – and Lena Headey (Game of Thrones) steals every frame as the chief villain.
Dredd missed the satire of the comic, but subsequent films would have fixed that. It was not to be. Dredd did merely OK at the box office and, by the time streaming and DVD had made the film a cult, the momentum for a sequel was lost. Although there are rumours of a Netflix series, with Urban reprising the role.
In a world where three hours is an accepted running time for a Batman instalment, Travis and Garland served up Dredd in 95 minutes flat. It is almost exactly the hyper-violent, sleaze-adjacent and brutish movie the character deserved. Bravo.
Dredd is now available to stream on iTunes, Google Play and YouTube.