Dredd Vs. The Raid: A Mini-Review Series - Dredd (2012)

Written In September 2014

In 2011 a little Indonesian action picture called The Raid: Redemption was shown off at the Toronto International Film Festival, a year later it got shown at the Sundance Film Festival, and audiences and critics agreed

This movie

Made these movies look like absolute dogcrap!

Speaking of which, you remember this crappy movie?

Well, in 2012, after Americans got to see The Raid, a reboot of that crappile came to the market starring none other than this blasted loon…

As the titular Judge.

The initial trailers were…

Underwhelming to say the least. BUT then the movie actually came out and people sat down to see it and went

In fact the movie currently sits at a 78% on the Tomato-meter, and seeing as how it was an adaptation of this series of funny books

Fanboys agreed it was a great adaptation and a lovely way of washing the foul taste of Stallone’s ego out of their mouths. But several fanboys noticed a number of similarities between this movie and another film, can you guess what it is?

Yep! Fanboys then did what fanboys always do and went into a whining fest about how “DREDD IS TOTALLY RIPPING OFF THE RAID! I MEAN IT’S NOT LIKE IT WENT INTO FILMING A FULL THREE MONTHS BEFORE THE RAID! OR THAT BEING FROM AN ENGLISH FILMMAKER IN SOUTH AFRICA AND A WELSH FILMMAKER IN INDONESIA THEY LIKELY HAD NO IDEA OF THE OTHER’S EXISTENCE UNTIL THE FILMS WERE RELEASED TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC! OR THAT SEVERAL ACTION MOVIES SINCE DIE HARD HAVE USED THE PLOT OF A LONE HERO IN TALL BUILDING THAT HAS TO WARD OF CRIMINALS IN ORDER TO GET TO THE BIG BAD BOSS! NO THEY’RE TOTALLY RIPPING OFF THE RAID JUST BECAUSE I SAW IT SOONER THAN I DID DREDD!”

But, the madness of these whiny entitled morons does open the door to a fun conversation. Which of these admittedly similar films is better? And seeing as how I’m still going to be unemployed for the next 72-120 hours, I figured I’d review and compare these two. So I’d say it’s time to wiggle on over to the synopsis and we’ll get started.

Plot Summary Taken From Wikipedia:

The future United States is a dystopic irradiated wasteland known as the Cursed Earth. On the east coast lies Mega-City One, a violent metropolis with 800 million residents and 17,000 crimes reported daily. There, an addictive new drug called “Slo-Mo” has been introduced, which slows the user’s perception of time to 1% of normal. The only force for order are the Judges, who act as judge, jury and executioner. Judge Dredd is tasked by the Chief Judge with evaluating new recruit Cassandra Anderson, a powerful psychic who failed the aptitude tests to be a Judge.

In Peach Trees, a 200-storey slum tower block, drug lord Madeline Madrigal, also known as “Ma-Ma”, executes three rogue drug dealers by having them skinned, infused with Slo-Mo and thrown down the atrium from the top floor. Dredd and Anderson are sent in to investigate and learn of a drug den, which they raid. They arrest a thug named Kay, whom Anderson’s mind probe reveals to be the one who carried out the drug dealers’ executions. Dredd decides to take him in for questioning. In response, Ma-Ma’s forces seize the tower’s security control room and seal the building, using its blast shields under the pretence of a security test, preventing the Judges from leaving or summoning help.

Ma-Ma orders Dredd and Anderson killed, forcing the Judges to fight their way through dozens of armed thugs. Arriving at the 76th floor, the Judges are assaulted by Ma-Ma and her men with Vulcan cannons that rip through the walls, killing numerous residents. The Judges breach an outer wall and are able to call for backup. Meanwhile, Ma-Ma sends her henchman Caleb to confirm the Judges’ deaths. When they meet, Dredd throws Caleb off the tower in full view of Ma-Ma.

Dredd suspects Ma-Ma is desperate to keep Kay quiet and beats him for information. Anderson intervenes and uses her psychic abilities to read Kay’s mind, learning that Peach Trees is the centre of Slo-Mo production and distribution. Anderson suggests they hide while awaiting assistance but Dredd insists they move up the tower and pursue Ma-Ma. Judges Volt and Guthrie respond to Dredd’s call, but Ma-Ma’s computer expert denies them entry by persuading them the security system is malfunctioning. A pair of armed teens confront Dredd and Anderson, allowing Kay to disarm and overpower Anderson. Kay then escapes with her as hostage, and takes her to Ma-Ma’s base on the top floor.

While Dredd works his way towards Ma-Ma, she calls in the corrupt Judges Lex, Kaplan, Chan and Alvarez. The four relieve Volt and Guthrie from duty and are allowed into the building. Dredd encounters Chan and is suspicious that he does not ask about Anderson’s status. Seeing his cover blown, Chan attacks Dredd, only to be killed. Meanwhile, Kay tries to execute Anderson with her own weapon, but the pistol’s DNA scanner does not recognise him and explodes, taking his arm off. She escapes and later encounters Kaplan, whom she promptly kills after reading her mind. Elsewhere, Dredd kills Alvarez but runs out of ammunition, and is shot by Lex in the abdomen. Lex moves in to execute Dredd, but Dredd stalls him long enough for Anderson to arrive and kill Lex.

Anderson and Dredd obtain the code to Ma-Ma’s apartment from her computer expert and confront her. Ma-Ma tells Dredd that in the case of her death, a device on her wrist will detonate explosives on the top floors, destroying the building. Dredd reasons that the detonator’s signal will not reach the explosives from the ground floor, so he forces Ma-Ma to inhale Slo-Mo and throws her down the atrium to her death.

In the aftermath, Anderson accepts that she has failed her evaluation by getting disarmed, and leaves. The Chief Judge asks Dredd about Anderson’s performance; he responds that she has passed.

So if I were to describe this film in a nutshell, I would say it’s if you put Die Hard in a post apocalyptic hellhole of a city and replaced John McClane with an only slightly cleaner Dirty Harry and added a character akin to Robin as his sidekick, and replaced Hans Gruber with Cersei from Game of Thrones, then completely axed McClane’s family from the proceedings, and possibly made one of Cersei’s thugs Dirty Harry and Robin’s prisoner. That is basically what this movie is, but is it awesome?

Karl Urban is pretty much the perfect man for this job, but then again, it’s not like the guy wasn’t already a badass? After all this is the same guy who got fought Bruce Willis in RED

Was on Dwayne Johnson’s crew in Doom

And coplotted an assassination with Vin Diesel

It actually went better than it looks like it did, but Karl didn’t exactly get what he wanted in the end.

Anywho, the point is, Karl Urban did an excellent job, and I shall explain why… Now.

PROS:

• Karl Urban’s Judge Dredd comes off perfectly! With the wrong script, director, or actor, the character could’ve easily come off as a heartless fascist who follows the law to the very t, but the guy’s done in just the right way, so that he comes off like a dude who holds his job in high esteem but isn’t against going easy on some guys (sometimes that word is used very loosely) and actually gives a crap about people. When he sees a van of three thugs kill a dude at the start of the movie, he’s just like “Okay, you know what, you just died today.” When Ma-Ma decides to shoot up an entire floor of Peach Trees, killing hundreds of men, women, and children, he goes off on Kay, the punk he and Anderson caught earlier that day. When two kids try to corner him with a gun, he puts on a tough guy act, but when he has to act he chooses to immobilize them as a threat to him and his rookie by stunning them, not just killing them. I also like how he kind of has a sense of humor, when Anderson realizes Kay’s one of the guys they’re in Peach Trees for, he tries to ask him to just confess so he won’t have to get stuck with any pencil pushing for turning in a guy they don’t know for certain is guilty of what they’re accusing him of. I also love his sense of irony, this whole mess got started because these jerks in the Ma-Ma clan threw a couple of guys off the highest floor and hit them with some slow-mo, so when he disposes Ma-Ma and he best guy, he throws them off the rails and hits Ma-Ma herself with some slow-mo for good measure. I guess he has a taste for poetic justice. I also like he’s not just a dumb brute with a gun, he’s smart, when he meets with one of the corrupt judges he quickly comes onto the fact that he is in fact a corrupt judge. When another judge is about to kill him, he asks him to wait, prompting him to go on about how Dredd is a coward and weak, allowing for the jerk to waste enough time for Anderson to get up behind and blow him to hell with a rifle. And you gotta give props to Karl Urban for emoting with just his jaw and his voice. If we’re gonna compare guys from 2012 comic book movies who spoke in bizarre affects and had over half their faces covered, I think Karl did a lot better as Judge Dredd here than Tom Hardy did as Bane in Dark Knight Rises, but that’s comparing apples and oranges honestly because
  
  Yeah.
• Lena Heady as Ma-Ma. Do I need to say more? Is it not enough to just say this character was played by freaking Lena Heady? No?
  
  
  Fine, ugh, I guess I can go into some detail. So for starters, what I like about this character, purely from the standpoint of writing a female character, she doesn’t spend her time, A. Seducing men. Or B. Hating men. She’s basically Heisenberg or Tony Montana with a vagina when you get right down to it. She’s a gangster, and she doesn’t mess around
  
  … At all. Also while she’s infamous for having done bodily harm to a man and known for starting out as a prostitute, her character isn’t about subjugating or intimidating men, she employs them and informs them that she is the one in charge. When she’s beating the crap out of one of her thugs, she isn’t doing it because he’s a stupid man, she’s doing it because he’s a stupid punk who has now endangered their entire operation. And she even cares about some men, when she sees Dredd toss her best guy, Caleb, over the railing directly across from her, she gets pissed, she really liked that dude. And she also doesn’t treat women moderately better than men, when Kay (the aforementioned stupid punk) comes back with Anderson, she doesn’t tell him to just shoot her up because she’s sensitive to the plight of being a woman in peril, she tells him to do that because it’s in the best interest of her and the gang that the two judges appear to have just been injured in a drug bust gone wrong instead of having been caught, tortured, raped, and THEN murdered. As for the character herself, I like how she’s a realist. When Dredd comes gunning for her, she doesn’t freak out because “Oh God! How did he find me!” She knows the balance of things; people commit crimes, crimes get noticed, other people report the crimes, police get notified, police come a-snooping, police find bad guys, bad guys die or go to jail; simple as that. She doesn’t give Dredd this grandiose villain speech about she will destroy him or how everything he believes in is based on a lie, no she just tells him that she’s got a device that’ll blow the top of the building causing several tons of rubble to fall on the civilians. She basically tells him that if you kill me you kill everyone in this damn block. I also like the way she handles the situation when she calls up the corrupt judges, she already has two judges inside the building, two outside of it hoping to get inside, and now she’s calling up four more judges who she assumes are open to her interests, she’s playing with fire right here. And she treats it as such, she talks when spoken to and she stands in a manner that offers attention but shows trepidation. Lena Heady just does a terrific job and I loved every second of her.
• Olivia Thirbly’s Judge Anderson is pretty much the perfect female sidekick in that, she’s not really treated as the FEMALE sidekick. Take a look at this uniform for starters
  
  Actual combat boots, long sleeves, long pants, no skirt or boob cups. Now take a look at this
  
  Exposed arms, heels, skirts, and boobs cups. Granted these characters are both warriors and are parts of very stylized films while Anderson in police officer in a pretty grounded movie, but at the same time, take a look at Sif and Anderson’s male counterparts
  
  Thor’s arms are covered in armor unlike Sif, Thor is wearing actual boots instead of platform shoes, while Dredd’s uniform is pretty much identical to Anderson’s minus the fact that he’s actually wearing his helmet (and of course has a different name on his badge). Now I’m not criticizing the Thor movies or Batman V Superman, the former are both movies I very much enjoy and the latter is a movie I cannot wait to see. I’m just calling out facts here. But as for the character herself? She’s a rookie, she’s optimistic, she’s not there to bust skulls, she’s there to make a difference in the world and hopefully make people sleep a little more soundly at night, and by the end of the movie that urge to do good is still present but it’s tempered by the fact that some people kinda deserve a skull-busting or two. I also like how her psychic powers don’t make her somehow omniscient like Professor Xavier, it’s just a helpful device that allows her to extract information without having to use violence. Plus, a moment I really appreciate is how she hands Dredd her badge at the end because she assumes she failed her field exam. She doesn’t slowly and tearfully hand it to him, she doesn’t plead for another chance, but at the same time she doesn’t act like she doesn’t care. She snatches it from her vest and shoves it into Dredd’s hand, then walks off. She doesn’t storm off but it’s far from just a gentle stroll. There’s a frustration there, but she’s resigned to the fact that she won’t be a judge. She obviously respects Dredd but she’s just angry that all her hardwork is all for not. Nice work Olivia, I hope to see more from you.
• Of the quartet of characters, I’d say Wood Harris’s Kay is by far the weakest, but it’s not at all a bad character, only a simple one. If you looked up the word thug in the dictionary, you’d like see a picture of him. He’s not terribly smart, but what he lacks in intelligence he makes up for in sadism. When Ma-Ma tells him and Caleb to skin the three pricks who were stepping on their territory he suggests that they give them slow-mo before they drop ‘em of the balcony so it’ll slow the process down even more. I like how whenever Dredd isn’t present he’s always trying to mess with Anderson, noting at one point that he ought to save her last bullet for herself so the clan won’t do anything to her while she’s still alive, and trying to freak her out by asking her to see what he’s thinking. I also appreciate how he’s not a complete idiot, while Dredd and Anderson are distracted by two kids threatening to shoot them, he uses this moment to get loose of his restraints, grab Anderson, and run back to Ma-Ma. He’s also responsible for my favorite moment of the movie when he, Ma-Ma, and the rest of the crew are watching Dredd take down a bunch of their guys after having snuck up on them trying to sneak up on him, leading for Kay to proclaim, “How the f*** are we gonna stop this guy?” If I were to describe his character I’d say he’s what you’d get if you made Jesse, from Breaking Bad, black and then surgically removed his heart. Then again, that show pretty much did surgically remove that poor man’s heart.
• I really enjoy some of the aesthetic choices of the film, the slow-mo sequences are GORGEOUS, in fact I actually saw an interview on the blu-ray where the production team explained they actually built a new camera that actually filmed footage at TWO-THOUSAND FRAMES per second. To contextualize that, most cameras capture footage at 24 FPS. If you don’t understand what that means, just click here it’ll explain the whole thing. I also for some reason really enjoyed the scene where the three junkies who were trespassing on Ma-Ma’s territory was initally done from a first person perspective, that was kind of cool.
• I really love some of the humor here, it’s not laughing non-stop like most Marvel films, but it’s all this sort of dry and occasionally crass humor, like this quick scene where Dredd and Anderson are taking an elevator down to the lobby with Kay in tow, after just doing a drug bust, and Anderson suddenly says “Sir he’s thinking about making a run for your gun.” Dredd replies with “Yeah?” Anderson then uses her psychic abilities on Kay and informs her senior that “He changed his mind.” To which Dredd replies “Yup.” It’s not laugh out loud hilarious, it’s just something worthy of a nice chuckle.
• A superficial detail I really liked were the look of the helmets. They aren't pure metal or fiberglass, there’s a felt like fabric inside them like a motorcycle helmet
  
  You see? It’s practical, it’s not just some fiberglass toy you can grab at Target, it’s a real helmet that will actually protect your noggin. Another detail I liked was how the guns were smart enough to know the difference between saying a word in conversation and actually giving a command, like during the beginning of the movie when a crook was threatening to kill a civilian and Dredd calls him a hotshot, the crook asks “What did you just call me?” And Dredd replies “I said… Hotshot.” His gun then recognizes that as a command and switches from normal rounds to hotshot rounds, and then Dredd launches a blast of plasma or something into the prick’s mouth and melts’s his freaking face off… God I love this movie! Another small detail I liked in the movie were the extras, now usually extras are just there to fill up the world, but these characters actually serve a point; they cement this place as a real world. America at the time this movie takes place in may be a desolate hellhole where no really WANTS to live, but the people are still people. The teenagers are still interested in things teens are normally interested in, when people see gorey in person, most of them cringe, but a couple say “Oh, that’s awesome! I gotta get a picture of that!” When a man in uniform points a gun at you, you don’t mouth off about how cops are such jerks, you put your freaking hands up and let them know “Woah, hey, I’m good! Don’t shoot!” And unlike, some very recent tragedies, these officers of course listen, but I really don’t want to get into that.
• I really enjoy the callbacks to earlier in the film. At three points in the film Dredd asks Anderson “You ready, rookie?” To which she consistently replies “Yes.” The first time Dredd looks at her skeptically but moves on to their assessment. The second time, when their about to start their drug bust, he tells her that she doesn’t look ready, as if to tell her that she needs to get her game face on. And on the third time, when they’re about to take the fight to Ma-Ma, Dredd gives her a look and says “You look ready.” And what I really love, is the moment near the beginning of the film where Dredd tells the chief justice that even if Anderson barely failed her exam she still failed it, then at the end of the film the chief asks him if she passed or failed her assessment, Dredd replies that she did in fact pass despite the fact that he had told her early on in the film that losing your weapon is considered an automatic failure and Anderson lost her weapon when she was captured by Kay.

CONS:

• I don’t really need for there to be satire, but knowing that the funny books this film is based on are often satirical in nature I would’ve definitely enjoyed some elements of that. Maybe they could’ve tackled that in a sequel. Oh well.
• The exchange between Dredd and Ma-Ma has always bothered me, I get what’s going on there, but it always bugged me how Dredd tosses Ma-Ma out of a window after she tells that if he does a bomb above her room will explode killing everyone in the building. I really wish they’d explained it better to be honest.

I believe I first saw this movie when I rented it on RedBox the week I graduated from High School and my GOD did I love it! I loved the ultra-violence of it! I loved the gorgeous slow-mo visuals! I loved Karl Urban growling his way through the proceedings! I loved Lena Headey scarred up mug every second it was on screen! And I absolutely loved the score. I’m gonna give Dredd a 9.8 out of 10!

This movie unfortunately only made $41 million against $45 million budget, so we’ll likely never see a true cinematic sequel thanks to LionsGate’s lousy marketing campaign. But Karl Urban and the film’s writer/producer, Alex Garland, having been working hard with fans of the film to a proper sequel made. So I urge you all, if you have Netflix stream this movie, if you have On Demand stream this movie, if you have a RedBox kiosk near you or still have a video store, rent this movie! Please, do everything in your power to help this movie get the second installment in so richly deserves! But, let us not dwell any longer on that crime, and instead dwell on the blessing that is

Which I shall be tackling next, so stay tuned people!