The old ultra-violence with colours that viddy right well on the screen, in a world that would make Alex and his Droogies weep for joy. Dredd takes up the coolly wanton, blackly satiric comic book by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, but strips it of all but the most incidental humour, and reduces narrative to a steely basic structure akin to the impervious, unstoppable chrome skeleton revealed by fire and carnage in The Terminator (1984). The setting is Mega-City, a post-apocalyptic amalgamation of hypertrophied North American urban zones, studded with supersized apartment blocks that have become universes unto themselves, where crime is endemic and the justice process has been conflated into the figure of cold-blooded super-warriors called Judges. Karl Urban is the determined chin under a helmet that’s stupidly designed but too iconic to be altered, with his lips perpetually drawn in into an ideogram of grimly righteous determination, dispensing calamity and judgement like Old Testament wrath of God, punitive, psychopathically violent, and a virtual cipher of character. Dredd is only a hero in the sense that as well as fighting for a very specific idea of moral order, the written code of law rather than a flexible human understanding of a given moment, his unbending adherence makes him incorruptible.
The original creation crossbred a kind of guilty, semi-ironic fetishisation of a specifically American brand of fascist righteousness, as perceived through a fantasy extreme by a British sensibility, and placed it in a milieu informed by British council estate angst and Winter of Discontent-esque crumbling services, adding up to a proto-cyberpunk sensibility that delighted in a grimy, gritty future malformed by human endeavour rather than liberated. Dredd the film annexes a specifically Euro-hued variety of dystopia, as evinced by the visions of Delicatessen (1989), Banlieu 13 (2004), Attack the Block (2011), and the Doctor Who episode “Paradise Towers”, which paint apartment buildings as infernal zones where urban lifestyle becomes survivalist nightmare. Dredd also takes the video game-prescribed levelled narrative structure to a new reductio ad absurdum in cinema shaping. There’s a certain kinship, too, to another last year’s thrill-machine rides, Frédéric Jardin’s Sleepless Night, in placing its hero in a situation defined at once by claustrophobic entrapment and constant kinetic rush. Lena Headey, promoted via her malignant Cersei in TV’s Game of Thrones to gal-you-love-to-hate status, plays Ma-Ma, a former hooker turned scar-faced queenpin running a drug cartel flogging “Slo-Mo” to punters, a drug that slows perception of time to languorous dreaminess, and giving director Pete Travis a chance to extend Wachowski-Snyder ramping effects in action scenes to ever more baroque extremes, complete with bullets exploding from cheeks and the hard end of a two-hundred-storey death plunge depicted in lovingly woozy detail. Dredd and rookie probationary Judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), who has telepathic powers as a post-atomic mutant, are called to the Peach Trees tower block, when three flayed victims of Ma-Ma’s regime in the block, seldom visited by the law, are hurled from on high and land in the middle of the courtyard. Dredd and Anderson find themselves trapped as Ma-Ma tries to ensure they can’t escape and uncover evidence about her drug ring.
The utter shamelessness of Dredd is its own justification, its laughing embrace of every insult ever fired at a modern action movie, celebrating the carbolic taste it puts in the mouth. Dredd gives itself over to a pure logic of carnage, providing exposition and developing story stakes only when strictly necessary, reducing the imperatives to the coldest simplicities, as befitting the cop-jury-judge compactness of its heroes’ mission brief. Screenwriter Alex Garland, who’s been doing unlikely but deft service in trash cinema since his early success as a novelist, reduces the comic’s pitch-black take on the bleak fantasia to occasional asides, like an automated cleaning machine casually sweeping up the pools of blood from multiple homicides, and glimpses of a cheapjack, prefab future of compartmentalised retail services and equally compartmentalised human feeling, are not far from Mike Judge’s Idiocracy (2006). The fact that the film was shot in South Africa, quite obviously at points, helps to give the film a subtext that’s more immediate than the dated roots of the material in Dirty Harry-era angst over vigilante law enforcement, with the anxiety of stretched resources and cheap humanity nascent. Domhnall Gleeson is the pasty, victimised tech geek who’s become a tortured plaything for Ma-Ma, having had his eyes cut out and replaced by cameras that make him better able to function as her security wizard, and he shuts down Peach Trees to prevent the Judges’ escape. Thirlby dyed her locks blonde to play Anderson, the nervy survivor of a ghetto childhood and fallout-induced genetic happenstance, now trying to become a Judge in hope she can make a difference for the assailed decent folk in the towers. She’s given an immersive survival test by Dredd, who disdains hauling around a candidate who failed her entrance exam and leaves off her helmet because it impedes her gift, but is of course finally impressed with her ingenuity and spirit, and surprising grip on her job’s true purpose.
Thirlby, seemingly doomed to hover on the periphery of stardom since Juno (2007) and her terrific turn in The Wackness (2008) and overshadowed by Olivia Wilde as another striking brunette with a Shakespearean first name, gives Dredd its core as a hero who hasn’t yet been processed into stoic omnicompetence: the entirety of the story is essentially a learning experience for her on the road to becoming so. Saddled with Ma-Ma’s lieutenant, and specific murder suspect Kay (Wood Harris), Anderson contends with his obnoxious psychic projections of rape and perversion, and turns the trick about as she rapes his mind. Director Travis, out of British TV with the taciturn realism of The Bill as his first credit and the cod-Kurosawa gamesmanship of Vantage Point (2008) his most notable film work, deploys little real wit or imagination of staging in action scenes – mostly just point gun, bang bang, with Dredd and Anderson pulled a lot too often out of the fire by their gadget-laden guns, and Ma-Ma’s gang offering only clobbering force without any spark of parkour or martial artistry to vary the action style. But Travis’s filming is clean and well-paced, his gift for proffering grisly spectacle without belabouring appreciable, and indeed he’s able to find visual rhapsody in savagery. The film is filled with framings and shots that authentically recreate not just the colour and clarity but also the specific tension that defines comic-book art, in the dialogue between the frieze-like singularity of the individual image and its place in a constantly onrushing, necessarily descriptive series of illustration. Travis particularly invests a weirdly luscious beauty in his visions of Slo-Mo distorted reality, locating the appeal of the escapist branding of drug use in intolerable environments. Ma-Ma’s comeuppance, a fulfilment of Dredd’s poetic sense of justice, sees her pumped full of her drug and sent for a free-fall down through the block’s two hundred levels, in the midst of a swirl of broken glass that glows like falling stars. She thus passes each stage and scene of slaughter she’s invoked, experienced as a Kubrickian swirl of wonder and horror before the inevitable hard landing, sensitising Ma-Ma and the viewer to the beauty of existence and the wrong of her acts in the most unexpected fashion possible. Dredd should be dreadful, but it is, instead, like this finale, perversely fascinating, disturbing, and transfixing.