Dredd 3D Movie Review [8/10 - Great]
Review by NY Times
It’s bang, bang, splat, splat for the 98 unmodulated minutes that are “Dredd 3D,” an action movie written by Alex Garland and directed by Pete Travis. Grim, gory and devoid of pleasure, kinetic or otherwise, this is the second big-screen take on the British comics series Judge Dredd, after a 1995 Sylvester Stallone vehicle best remembered for Sly’s shiny, oversize codpiece. Like that movie, this one takes place in ye olde dystopia, a neo-wild West in which the gizmos look futuristic, but everything else — the drooling cretins, generic innocents, slathering villainy and fascistic overtones — is B-movie familiar, although with 100 percent more digitally enhanced carnage.
Review by Philly.com
You better hope Dredd doesn’t pull you over some dark night for a broken taillight. Because this motorcycle cop dispenses justice with a strong degree of finality. Based on the British comic-book character, Judge Dredd is a tough man in a bleak future – policing 800 million souls jammed into a crime-saturated urban jungle that extends from Boston to Washington. In Dredd 3D, Dredd is played with grim conviction by Karl Urban (The Bourne Supremacy). At least, the credits maintain that it’s Urban. Since he wears a helmet with tinted visor in every scene, you never see his face.
Dredd doesn’t have a broad emotional palette – he sees the world in black and red. But Urban must do all his acting with his lips, which for most of the film are turned down in revulsion so that he resembles a cutthroat trout. And all his lines are delivered in a scratchy monotone.
Review by Wall Street Journal
“Dredd 3D” is the iPhone of recent action thrillers. The movie doesn’t do apps, or, for that matter, drop calls, but this particularly violent thriller is distinguished by elegant design. What’s familiar about the film is the grunge concatenation of firepower, body count and gross-out abuse of all-too-tender flesh. What’s exceptional is the orchestration of color, form, light and dark (lots of dark), 3-D technology and digital effects into a look that amounts to a vision. The director was Pete Travis, working from a shrewd, terse screenplay by Alex Garland; the production designer was Mark Digby, and the cinematographer was Anthony Dod Mantle. (The latter two collaborated similarly on “Slumdog Millionaire.”) The opening shot is a variation on the theme of “WALL•E”—a slow flyby over a vast garbage dump of a megalopolis in a blighted future, except that this sprawl, Mega City One, is fully inhabited. The city is a battleground between free-range criminals and so-called Judges, the Robocop-ish descendants of Rambo who function as judges, juries and executioners, not to mention noisemakers, what with their flatulent motorcycles and end-of-days weaponry.
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