Sunday, September 23, 2012

Dredd 3D

is another of those movies that you will enjoy only if you are in its target audience.  It is a honey badger of a film:  it gives not a single fuck about acting, plot logic, physics, or any of the normal concerns you might reasonably ask a movie to address.  No, Dredd exists to show us Karl Urban (well, his chin) and Olivia Thirlby (dyed blonde; what's up with that?) stalking through floor after floor of a giant high-rise and killing bad guy after bad guy while the Big Boss, Ma-Ma (the funky spelling lets you know that, hey, wow, this is the future) gets freakier and freakier. 

Actually, to be more accurate, Dredd 3D exists to show us all of that in 3D, so that when Dredd blows a hole in a drug user's face, we don't just see the hole, we see bits of jaw and tooth and skin and a shitload of blood flying toward our glasses-covered eyes. 

At this point, you should already know if you're in this movie's target audience.  If you're not, no worries; I'm sure you can always stream A Room With a View (which, I must admit, I loved) on Netflix.

Me? They had me at bullet through the face.

Of course, I'd have paid just to watch Lena Headey chew the scenery as Ma-Ma. 

Putting up with Karl Urban was merely another price I was willing to pay.

If you are the type of person for this movie, do not miss it on the big screen in 3D.  You won't for a moment confuse it with a genuinely good film, or one that makes any sort of sense, but you will have a good time.

(By the way, I feel obliged to note that you will even have enough of a good time to at least cut its creators some slack for how much they seemed to have stolen from the awesome The Raid: Redemption. To be fair to the Dredd folks, I don't know which movie came first, but the plot scaffolding is strong enough to support these two films and more in the future--as I'm sure it will.) 



2 comments:

John Lambshead said...

Good ole Judge dread. I am a fan of the Big Finish audio dramas.

Deb Franklin said...

I'd been ignoring info on the Dredd movie. Then I saw your review with 'dyed blonde' and I thought, "Could that be PSI Judge Anderson?" And sure enough she's in it. It's on my must watch even if I will be squealing and covering my eyes. =)

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