Dredd
"This isn't a negotiation. The sentence is death." - Judge Dredd
release year: 2012
genre: action/adventure
viewing setting: home Bluray 7/10/20 and 11/15/17 and 9/4/15 and 11/9/13
synopsis: In a dark future, a tough cop almost singlehandedly fights an entire building full of criminals.
impressions: It was pretty good, with a ton of violence and gore. Dredd took out 46 bad guys, while his partner (a rookie who he was breaking in and just got an unlucky first day assignment) bagged 9 herself. Plus she was psychic, which came in handy several times. One cool bad-ass moment came when Dredd, after surviving the entire minigun decimation of the floor he's on, calmly walks out to the rail and tosses Ma-Ma's right-hand man over the rail to fall hundreds of floors to his death...right in front of her and a bunch of her henchmen. Another was when Dredd found his way onto the PA system and told everyone in the building that he was the law, he was going to put an end to the bad guys, and to stay out of his way or die. A couple of annoyances: 1) slow-motion scenes (thankfully, after a couple of early ones, this filming tactic pretty much ceased) and 2) loud thrashing music during action scenes. Sometime in the 1990s, this trend of putting loud music in the background of action scenes became the thing to do, but I've always maintained that it's a cheap, pointless, annoying way to film a scene.
body count: 69 confirmed (46 of them by Judge Dredd)
activation point: around 29:00, when Ma-Ma seals the building and commands everyone in it to kill the Judges
acting: Karl Urban never takes his helmet off, and he's all business as the square-jawed Judge Dredd. Olivia Thirlby is the rookie Judge with ESP powers, and her character comes a long way in the events of this movie. A scarred, tattooed, smirking, dirty-teethed Lena Headey is the sinister head of the evil empire.
final word: Worth seeing, and better than Stallone's 1996 version.
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