Reviews of Judge Dredd (1995) and related work
- Same source material: Dredd (2012)
Judge Dredd (1995
)
Judges not unlike the superheroes of Judges (ca. 650–500 BCE).
Camp.
‣ Dredd (2012)
Seen in 2026.
Judge Dredd and a psychic rookie are alone against an ambitious gang leader who’s selling a new drug.
There’s a slightly silly metafictional conceit in calling the new drug “Slomo” and using slow-motion photography to illustrate its effects. Aside from that detail, this adaptation of the comic is strangely workmanlike in a way that would already have felt old school in 2012. The villain’s gang is not actually larger than a realistic criminal organization, and the story of their expansion could just as easily have been set in reality. A lot of the set design is conspicuously mundane.
2012 was the last year that feature phones outsold smartphones. Tellingly, there is a scene in Dredd when a bystander films something on a smartphone, and a hacker plays a major role, but the hacking here is low tech compared to Neuromancer (1984), or even to the state of the art in 2012. Details like exotic Lawgiver ammunition and the archology going into “war”-mode lockdown are specific to the setting, but do not carry the plot. There are sfnal go-tos here that the writer Alex Garland just doesn’t touch, like the potential use of Slomo in combat, and the interaction between drugs and psychic powers.
Instead of being about an imaginary future, or having the counter-cultural satirical sensibilities of the 1970s original, the heart of the 2012 adaptation is a butt-rocking tribute to Asian action movies like Hard-Boiled (1992) and The Raid (2011) with worse stunts and poor special effects. It’s less campy than the 1995 adaptation, and it is entertaining, but not more entertaining.
References here: Ex Machina (2014).