A Dredd review that might be too focused on its 4 top billing cast members.

Ah, Armored Core Six Fires of Rubicon! Aren’t you a harsh mistress? Not only do you yourself refuse to relief me, your makers chose market you in a way that made me want to watch 2012’s Dredd again. Why do they feel the need to cast Karl Urban in an ad? Is he a bad enough dude to give that prep talk for mercs in mechs so more English speakers would play this rathe niche game? Man, 2022 Keighley’s Best Game Direction sure went to that lot’s collective head.

Nearly DOOM

Suppose Karl Urban, as the titular lead of Dredd, is good as any point to start with that movie. One can say that he was just playing Judge Dredd in that AC6 commercial. with a kind of American accent that is too standard to be real and the serious tone. Of course, Mr. Urban has been familiar with the concept of acting for video games since one of his early starring roles was 2005’s DOOM.

He played a role the closest to DOOM guy in that action horror movie. On the action front, we saw he shooting dozens in a point-of-view shot (Hell no, I’m not calling it “the FPS scene”.). On the horror front, he played “the final boy” (But not “the sole survivor” mind you.). So even his role in that movie feels nothing like the player character in 1993’s DOOM, he came closer than all his dead squad mates. And the punch line here is that 2012’s Dredd proved that if Mr. Urban did play the DOOM marine of Romeo’s id days, he can still knock it out of the park until proper direction.

I don’t think the helmet thing is too big a deal. There are 8 Judges in the movie as active death squad members and except Olivia Thirlby as Rookie Casandra Anderson they all keep their helmets on. Urban got the credits for his longer screen time. Guess with Stallone’s refusal to do so back in early nineties, they did take anyone who agreed to not showing their faces.

What moved Dredd closer to the DOOM guy is Judges’ service weapon, the Law Giver. Being an arsenal with the size of a pistol. This movie did show how the gun is more than a peashooter by having Dredd first fire it with something called Hotshot, a bullet would melt someone’s head off.

Then there are the corridors, those can be seen as the movie’s main attraction when it came out as 3D movie in theatres back then. And there is video game like escalation in those corridors. First there are poor schmuck picking up guns for some extra bucks, mostly got shot by Urban’s Dredd. Then there is set-piece with the gatling guns. Finally there are the paid-off Judges similarly armored and better armed.

Psychic pass

Dredd came out in an interesting time. The month after its theatrical release, a little anime titled Psycho-pass came to smaller screens and by all means those 2 would make nice companion pieces to each other. On the one hand there is the dystopian future law enforcement where cops are authorized to play death squad yet the whole thing is not as efficient as advertised. On the other you got the vet and rookie story.

There was a time when I would love to see Hollywood adapting Psycho-pass, before I realized that Pacific Rim would be their best and it just would not do. I even had some fantasy booking: Tom Cruise as the antagonist based on Shogo Makishima, since he would just play his Collateral role again; Urban’s Almost Human co-star Micheal Ealy as the one based Zinoza, since he played a robot in that show, the “had a stick so far up his ass that his digest system is falling” type should be fitting; Then depends on which parent of the blue-eyed and light-skinned black man is white, the father of “Zinoza” with a cyber arm can be played either by Dave Bautista or Forest Whitaker, since both had played memorable bit players in movies with cyberpunk vibe of the 2010s.

But none of the above would occur to me if Urban as Dredd and Thirlby as Anderson could not be mapped onto Enforcer Shinya Kokami and Inspector Akane Tsunamori nicely. Psycho-pass’ first episode is about a young woman of “fresh out of college” age goes to a slum and hunt for a rapist. The entirety of Dredd is about Anderson getting her license to kill if she can survive a day in the field, which turned out to be all about a drug bust in a hostile slum. Both are seen as special girl, Tsunamori is a highly functional sociopath with the right amount of empathy for her to be copping while Anderson is psychic. They both got bad ass moments, but by the end of day only their archetypical action hero like male working partners got to take down the big bad.

The HBO rogue galley

The main villains of this movie are Kay played by Wood Harris and his boss Ma-Ma played by Lena Herldy. The casting here could be seen as “Oh, they did well on HBO, just cast them”. Harris played the drug dealing kingpin Avan Barksdale in the Wire while Herldy played the ruthless queen Cerci Lannister in Game of Thrones.

Herdy with a mean scar face and American accent is a fitting villain. Though Ma-ma does have other similarities with Ceric, including eye-gauging, though Ma-ma did so herself while Cerci had other doing her bidding and 2 years later than this movie. Both had “fondness” through towards slim young men with blond hair and apple cheeks. And the story would not end until both were dead. Then of course kudo to this movie for making people falling from high places and to their death into a art form.

Harris seems to bring that Barksdale hates cops vibe to the 2 science fiction movies I saw him in. There would be the Relipcant hating in 2017’s Blade Runner 2049 and here his character Kay hates Judges and mutants. Guess only the Wire’s length allow room to show what Harris’ character likes. Funny enough, we only had Ma-ma’s words that Kay is dead in this movie. Like how Barksdale would live like a king in prison by the end of Wire, I imagine Kay with one hand would stay alive and in the game with street cred of caught a Judge, trainee as she was, and fired a Law Give, ill-advised as that was.

Over and out

Overall Dredd is an enjoyable action flick even with its limited scope. The movie looks a bit monotone, but since that tone is warmer it still feels fresh. The mechanic like escalation of its action can still put all video game adaption to shame. And a note to video game developers, maybe keep the ultimate challenge in an earlier stage of your products and give us some freebie power trip by the end? Like how Anderson finally became part of a well-oiled killing machine in this move?