Dredd (2012 Here's another one we decided to catch up with upon hearing it was soon going bye-bye-bye on Netflix.
Relax, if you think we'd attempt a laborious comparison with Sylvester Stallone's "Judge Dredd" a 1995 attempt to bring this comic book hero to the big screen. Our only dim memory of it - just another generic sci-fi/action movie coming off the studio sausage factory assembly line...
Chances are, even Stallone forgot about that one's existence.
Let's just deal with "Dredd" a far more fanboy-friendly attempt in its single-minded dedication to dystopian nihilism and splattering carnage.
This movie presents a future so incredibly bleak, we could only wonder why everybody hadn't already killed themselves. What's left of planet Earth is either ruined or part of a perpetual urban sprawl. Now the whole world's a big city slum, with terrified humans living in towering slum housing developments. ruled by trigger-happy psycho gang lords.....
Law 'n order, as well as courts, trials sentencing and punishment is left in the hands of fearsome Terminator-style 'Judges', supercops authorized to instantly, function as judge, jury and executioner when called upon. Door Dash justice, delivered right to your front door.
Stopping to provide deliverable rule-of-law to one of these mega-slums comes Judge Dredd (Karl Urban) and fresh-out-the-academy rookie Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) Anderson's not much of a cop, but she's valued for her extraordinary psychic powers.....
No sooner do Dredd and Anderson arrive when the complex's entire criminal population turn out to welcome them..... not with a gift basket but with enough firepower equal to two or three of George W. Bush's recreational middle east wars.
Running the show is the building's QueenPin, Ma-Ma. (Lena Headley), horribly disfigured and way, way into the psycho danger zone. You have to admire Ma Ma's obsessive determination to smear the walls with Dredd.......especially when she wields a 50 caliber machine gun to vaporize an entire floor of the apartment building.....along with its men, woman and children residents.
Yet despite the odds weighing heavily against them, you just know that Dredd and psychic-cutie will plow through throngs of Ma Ma's disposable minions like a threshing machine in a wheat field.
And so they do......with many carnage-cam closeups of point-blank, flesh shredding gunfire. The red stuff flows in gallons, coming close to that legendary tsunami that erupted from the elevator's in "The Shining".
We've no real ax to grind against this movie.....for what it is and what it sets out accomplish, it's efficient as hell. It's provides the same kind of unencumbered adrenalin rush as the comic book it's based on and hardly ever stops for those pesky pace-killing aspects......like character development.
In a way, we admire its determination to let nothing impede its great worship of splatter, slaughter, and the sheer thrill of watching dystopian scumbags perish in geysers of their own life's blood.
Let's face it, , there's not a dull minute anywhere in the entire film.......which is far more than we can say for some of the so-called Academy Award nominees we suffered through. 3 stars (***)
No comments:
Post a Comment