Travis Marmon
If you’re like me, you love bad movies, especially in theaters. Some of my favorite movie experiences of the past few years have been going to see “Ninja Assassin,” “G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra” and “Dragonball: Evolution.” “Dredd 3-D” is on the level of those masterpieces.
Don’t be fooled by the 7.7 rating on IMDb or the Metascore of 59 — “Dredd” is cinematic garbage. The acting is wooden, the action is silly and the one-liners fall flat every time. The climax of the film had me laughing harder than I have in a theater in five years. And I wasn’t the only one.
For the unaware, the “Dredd” universe was created in the comic “2000 A.D.” America is a fascist state, with the majority of the population living in Mega City — a metropolis stretching from Boston to Washington, D.C., that contains 800 million people. Justice is upheld by “judges,” who are essentially armored supercops that act as judge, jury and executioner at the scene of the crime. Judge Dredd (Karl Urban) is the baddest of them all, eternally scowling beneath his helmet. In the first scene, he finds himself in a hostage situation with a junkie holding a gun to an innocent woman’s head. After the perp decides against negotiating, Dredd calls him “hotshot” before firing a bullet into his mouth and melting his head. Seriously.
The majority of the movie takes place in a tower complex where Dredd and a psychic judge-in-training named Anderson (Olivia Thirlby of “Juno” fame) have come to investigate a triple homicide in which the men were skinned alive and drugged with Slo-Mo (a narcotic that makes everything appear to move at one percent of its actual speed) before being thrown 200 stories to their deaths.
It turns out that the tower is controlled by a gang, led by the merciless Ma-Ma (Lena Headey). Ma-Ma’s crew manufactures and distributes Slo-Mo, and when the judges capture one of them (Wood Harris of “The Wire”), she locks down the entire complex and orders its residents to kill Dredd and Anderson.
From here the movie is just a series of hard-to-follow action sequences, painful dialogue, bizarre psychic torture scenes and stupid plot twists. Alex Garland should be ashamed of the screenplay that he has written. Urban should be embarrassed by everything that comes out of his mouth. Harris and Headey should think about what makes them great on their respective HBO series, and ask how they ended up in this drek.
At the same time, these elements are what make the movie a fantastic viewing experience. It is a jaw-dropping cinematic event not because of the stunts, but because of how terrible the whole concoction is. The blood is a bright scarlet hue. Slo-Mo is just an obvious excuse for slow-motion sequences that even Zack Snyder would find excessive. The one-liners delivered by Dredd aren’t even cheesy. They’re just bad. Sometimes even miserable. And that’s why “Dredd” is great.
From a critical perspective, “Dredd” is worth maybe one-and-a-half stars. But if you missed “The Expendables 2” and want something terrible to point and laugh at, “Dredd” is a five-star experience worth seeing again and again.