Dredd
2012 · Directed by Pete Travis
Original language: English
- action
- science fiction
The story
In the future, America is a dystopian wasteland. The latest scourge is Ma-Ma, a prostitute-turned-drug pusher with a dangerous new drug and aims to take over the city. The only possibility of stopping her is an elite group of urban police called Judges, who combine the duties of judge, jury and executioner to deliver a brutal brand of swift justice. But even the top-ranking Judge, Dredd, discovers that taking down Ma-Ma isn’t as easy as it seems in this explosive adaptation of the hugely popular comic series.
What it’s like
Cold blue-grey light and sickly green neon soak the towers of Mega-City One, with the drug-haze slow-motion sequences rendered in saturated, swimming colour that breaks the grit into something dreamlike. The camera stays close and kinetic, handheld in tight concrete corridors and tilting into hard reframes during shootouts, while the score is a pulsing, bass-heavy electronic throb that rarely lets up. Sound design does much of the work: boots on steel grating, rain hammering a megablock's exterior, the mechanical clack of weapons. The overall vibe is bleak, relentless and humourless, a claustrophobic dystopian grind with little breathing room. Pacing is tight and muscular, built around a single long night in one building, and the emotional register stays hard and procedural, with a stern veteran lawman gradually shown a rookie's sharper instinct. Intensity is high: frequent, graphic gunfire and bloody, brutal violence, with drug-induced sequences that are disturbing rather than gory in tone, plus some profanity and grim cruelty. This is not gentle viewing. It suits viewers who want relentless, stylised action and a bleak futuristic world, the kind who enjoy grimy genre films with a fierce sense of atmosphere.
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