Dredd 3D [Review]

I went to see DREDD 3D over the weekend and it was awesome.

Karl Urban plays the lead role – and you only ever see the lower half of his face, really, since the mask is never, ever, removed. For those not familiar with the 2000AD comic – Mega-City One has a corps of elite Street Judges – who, in a masterful stroke of dystopian efficiency are police, jury, judge and, where applicable (and it often is) executioners all rolled into one. One such Judge is perhaps, as his surname suggests, the most feared. Judge Dredd.

Let’s get one thing clear this movie has nothing to do with the 1995 Sylvester Stallone Hollywood abomination. This is an independent production that captures the grit and darkness of the original comic character well. In fact, John Wagner – the guy who created the british comic book character back in the 1970s said :

“I have read the script (by Alex Garland) and seen Jock’s visuals. While I can’t go into detail about the content I can say that it’s high-octane, edge of the seat stuff, and gives a far truer representation of Dredd than the first movie. I hated that plot. It was Dredd pressed through the Hollywood cliché mill, a dynastic power struggle that had little connection with the character we know from the comic.”

It’s a sharp, dynamic and gritty action flick that ticks all the right boxes – and the introduction of a new narcotic called Slo-Mo (which reduces the users perception of time to a minute fraction of it’s real speed) was a clever devise to showcase some stunning three-d visual effects, in slow motion, obviously.

- review by Andrew Tidball