“Vantage Point” director Pete Travis and “28 Days Later”
scenarist Alex Garland have conspired to make a hopelessly abysmal reboot of the British
“2000 AD” comic strip. New Zealand actor
Karl Urban steps into the boots that Sylvester Stallone wore in director Danny
Cannon’s “Judge Dredd” that bombed at the box office back in 1995. Despite its estimated $50 million production
cost, “Dredd 3-D” (* OUT OF ****) looks like a low-budget, made-for-television
movie. Although it takes place in a
distant, post-apocalyptic America of the future, this science fiction saga delivers
little high octane action and no narrative revelations. Unlike the first “Judge Dredd” epic with its
flying cars and motorcycles, “Dredd 3-D shuns “Blade Runner” airborne
automobiles and hovering motorcycles. This
shallow, straightforward British/South African co-production confines itself strictly to only a few
settings. Most of the low octane action occurs in an enormous skyscraper
complex that houses about 60-thousand citizens. Whereas the original “Judge Dredd” concerned
our hero’s efforts to exonerate himself for being framed for the murder
of a journalist on the basis of DNA evidence, the new “Dredd” amounts to a pedestrian police
procedural set in a sprawling city state.
Karl Urban channels “Dirty Harry” with his raspy, low-key, monosyllabic dialogue
delivery. Indeed, he never removes his helmet during this 95-minute, R-rated urban outing. Essentially, Urban looks like
Beetle Bailey because only his mouth and chin are visible. Granted, this is in keeping with the
way Judge Dredd appears in the comic strip, but “Dredd 3-D” is a feature film,
not a one-dimensional comic strip.
“Dredd 3-D” unfolds in a post-nuked America. Basically, only one city exists, and it is Mega
City, with some 800-thousand residents.
Mega City occupies the east coast of the United States, roughly
encompassing Boston and Washington, D.C., while everything else that lies outside
its wall consists of scorched wasteland. The Stallone “Judge Dredd” occurred in part
outside the walls of Mega City,” while “Dredd 3-D” is set wholly within Mega
City. Crime has reached epidemic
proportions, with twelve serious crimes occurring every minute and 17-thousand
happening each day. Street judges are so
overworked that they can at best only intervene in six percent of all
crime. When “Dredd 3-D" opens, our helmet-clad
hero is straddling a motorcycle and pursuing three villains in a car as they swerve through traffic while
using a new drug called ‘Slo Mo.’ Judge
Dredd (Karl Urban of “Star Trek”) has no problem subjugating all three
criminals. At the Hall of Justice, he
learns that he has acquired a new partner, an aptly named Cassandra Johnson (Olivia
Thirlby of “No Strings Attached”), who possesses psychic powers that
enable her to read an individual’s mind.
Earlier, Cassandra failed an aptitude test that would have qualified her
to be a judge. These street judges have
the legal authority to sentence criminals on the spot and even execute them if
their misconduct is bad enough. The Chief Judge wants to get Cassandra another
chance so he assigns her to Judge Dredd to reassess her candidacy as a judge. “Dredd
3-D” is reminiscent of the Dirty Harry police thriller “The Enforcer” where
Harry was saddled with a rookie detective. Anyhow, these two are dispatched to Peach
Trees, a ghetto-like high rise where a major criminal, Madeline Madrigal (Leana
Headey of HBO’s “Game of Thrones”), dominates the drug trade. She has three men injected with Slo Mo,
skinned alive, and hurled to their deaths from the top of the tower. Dredd and Cassandra are dispatched to investigate. No sooner have they set foot on the premises
and arrested one suspect than they find themselves trapped in the tower. The ruthless criminals have shut Peach Trees
down and sealed it off completely so that nobody else can exit it. What ensues is a blood bath with a high body
count that our indestructible heroes survive with a close shave or two.
“Dredd 3-D” is as one-dimensional as a cardboard punch-out
book. The characters are sketchy, and the
actors who incarnate them bring little humanity to them. Whereas “Judge Dredd” was a sardonic exercise
in mock-heroic action, “Dredd 3-D” is as humorless as it is moribund. Leana Headey is looks like a Cosmo model with scars on her right cheek. Actually,
all the villains look pretty cool, but they are at the same time incredibly
incompetent. At one point, they
devastate an entire floor trying to perforate our heroes with three,
six-barreled Gatling gun style General Electric M134 mini-Vulcan machine guns. These weapons can pour out between 2000
and 6000 rounds of 7.62 mm shells a minute.
Villains like these dastards constitute little challenge for our heroes. If this weren’t lame enough, even Cassandra
with her psychic powers cannot divine the thoughts of a suspect that Dredd and
she have already arrested and who is standing behind her. This villain is able to free himself from his
bonds and abduct her! Nothing about this
Judge Dredd movie is innovative. A
showdown like this between our heroes and an army of hoodlums was depicted with greater savagery in “Punisher: War Zone” (2008) and the most recent movie “The Raid—Redemption.”
As for the 3-D effects, they add nothing to this lackluster exercise in déjà-vu. Originally, 3-D movies were designed to make
the audience duck when a flying projectile winged its way at them. 3-D movies like “Dredd 3-D” resemble the
images that were once available on those vintage Viewmaster Viewers where you
loaded a picture disc into it. Not
surprisingly, “Dredd 3-D” lives up to its title.
