Dredd

I watched Dredd (2012) about a month ago on NetFlix. I was browsing the catalog and came across Dredd. I mistook it for the old Judge Dredd movie with Sylvester Stallone from 1997. Even though I hadn’t seen the old one for roughly 20 years probably it didn’t take long to figure out I was watching another movie. The Judge Dredd played here by Karl Urban is way more articulate than the one from Stallone. He has a similar deep grumbling voice but the words come out in a clear way that is easy to understand. Stallone always talks a little bit like he still has a mouthful of something. This Dredd movie turned out to be a nice surprise, not the campy pleasure I was expecting from rewatching the old movie but better acting, better cinematography and better story than what I remember from the old one. Of course now I have to go and watch the old one so I can compare but I didn’t find it yet. In the movie you never see Dredd without his helmet on so at the end I had look for who was the actor and then search around a bit who Karl Urban is to remember I saw him play in many movies before like Lord of the Rings, Red and the Bourne Supremacy. I now also know he plays Dr McCoy in the new Star Trek movies which I must confess I haven’t seen yet. I said the story in this movie is better than in the old one but obviously this is not a movie if you are looking for a sophisticated story with lots of plot and unexpected turns. It is a quite straight forward story playing in a high rise controlled by a drug cartel out to kill Dredd and the psychic rookie judge Anderson. Lots of shooting and dead bodies from the sentenced criminals. Urban gives Dredd a deep and menacing voice, embittered, unforgiving and relentless in the pursuit of punishing criminals. Anderson is still human and sees the person behind the criminal. Luckily the drug lord Ma Ma that wants to kill them is pure evil so that makes the judge, jury and executioner role of these judges still palatable. In this cartoonesk setting of good against evil this can be enjoyed, in any more realistic setting it would be depressing and downright scary. If you want to spend an hour and a half in a simplistic universe where killers get their due this is a movie to watch. No emotional strings attached, which is really the weakness of the movie. Dredd is not a very likeable character but Ma Ma is far less likeable.