"Dredd"

I read some time ago an article which stated that NASA was using the film "Armageddon" as a training exercise; asking their newest scientists and engineers to watch the film and point out all the scientific inaccuracies they could find (the number of which being somewhere in the neighborhood of 186). I feel as though the filmmakers of "Dredd" must have done something similar; painstakingly scouring its predecessor, "Judge Dredd" for its every cinematic failing.
 
Now, that’s not to say that the original doesn’t have it’s offerings; it is entertainingly bad.
In my post about “Don’t Look Now”, I talked about movies that were bad enough to earn from “AV Club” an ‘F’, a grade reserved for films which are bad in an original way. While this grade is reserved for the worst films in history, these films can be divided into two categories: those which are unwatchable, so bad that they are capable of doing psychological damage upon repeat or even singular viewing; and those which are so bad that they’ve somehow looped back around to entertaining, as though the presence of Joel, Crow and Tom Servo is implicit. For me, “Don’t Look Now” falls into the former of these two categories. “Judge Dredd”, on the other hand, falls into the latter.
 
“Judge Dredd” is a clutter of disjoint stories and movie types, namely a John Woo style action movie starring Sylvester Stallone and Armand Assante, a Lifetime-television-esque conspiracy mystery starring Diane Lane, and a Rob Schneider ‘Comedy’ (to use the term loosely), all set against the backdrop of a 90’s-typical flashy scifi, complete with spandex and neon and disneyworld reject animatronic puppets and bad matting jobs and flying motorcycles, like they were trying to make a cross between “Blade Runner” and “Flash Gordon”.
 
"Judge Dredd" is hardly the first comic-book-based property to be eviscerated on celluloid in the eighties and nineties. "Spawn", "The Shadow", "The Phantom", "Steel", the '89 "Punisher" movie, the '91 "Captain America" movie, and even (somewhat) the third and definitely the fourth films in both the "Superman" and "Batman" franchises all, to some degree or another, fall into many of the the same traps. Instead of following the nature of a character to cast an appropriate actor to the role, the film is made a vehicle for a particular star.  Instead of trying to translate the world of the comic into one which fits a cinematic audience as opposed to graphic novel readership, the filmmakers attempt to make a movie that watches the way a comic book reads, which has only ever worked for "Creepshow", which doesn't count because that was a horror comic, not a superhero one. And then there are the tights.
 
The 1989 "Batman" movie of Tim Burton was groundbreaking in many ways, but the one for me that goes least talked about is the costume: this was the first time where the Batman costume consisted of something more than simple cloth or tights. It was a big, heavy suit of rubber armor, the most practical version of the costume for that point in time. This only helps to highlight one of the key problems in 90's comic book films: anti-heroes cannot be badasses and be flashy at the same time. They cannot ride around in neon and black lighting. They cannot have comedy relief sidekicks. And, most assuredly, they cannot wear spandex.
 
These are just some of the many flaws and false steps of 1995's "Judge Dredd", and 2012's "Dredd" side steps, avoids, or directly counters every one of them with a style all its own.
 
The shiny, bright and clean look and feel of the original is now grim, gritty, seedy and grey.  The bright neon and futuristic ‘Megacity’ is replaced by an unending slum, punctuated by monolithic tenements. The superhero-like judges are now beat-cops; their high-and-mighty smugness replaced with a world-weariness; spandex and linebacker shoulder pads replaced with SWAT-like body armor; their ridiculous flying motorcycles simplified and made more realistic. Even the titular character, himself, is completely different: while both are secretive, withdrawn, moral and brutal, the original’s conspiracy-centric genetically engineered past is ignored entirely, and this new Dredd is a colder, more strategic, and more mysterious. However, it doesn’t matter; this is not some major conspiracy, it’s a western.
In “Dredd”, the title character is partnered with a trainee.  The two enter a tenement called “Peach Trees”, and quickly find themselves hunted by any and all of the employees of the local drug kingpin, who turns out to have the entire building under her thumb and control. It’s a classic western theme; a crooked boss has run a town into a criminal empire under marshall law, dispensing their own brand of torturous punishment against any who might rebel or betray, when a new sheriff comes into town to take them all on, a masked man or a man with no name.
 
The environment is rich with additional detail which gives the film a ‘20 minutes into the future’ feel. The drug, ‘slo-mo’, giving the users the experience of slow time, also gives the filmmakers ample opportunity to justify utilizing ‘bullet-time’ techniques pioneered in “The Matrix”, but making them their own. Dredd’s trainee partner explained to be, within the first act, a mutant telepath, giving additional opportunity to create some artful visuals. In my review of “Don’t Look Now”, I criticised that film’s director for abandoning or ignoring his directorial duties in favor of dressing up the film with pretentious and insincere visuals masquerading as art.  “Dredd” does the exact opposite; it is a consistent, solid, cohesive film, well directed, well acted, with original and honestly artful visuals, dark and gritty, and, at the same time, beautiful.
 
It’s predecessor may have been entertainingly bad, this new “Dredd” is entertaining and stunning.