One remake no one ever expected to happen was a remake of Judge Dredd, a mid 90’s action vehicle, which starred Sylvester Stallone marching around a gigantic city, with a red bucket on his head shouting: “I am the law” at young criminals before shooting them. It was bad. And it did hideous business. But there’s always the chance for reinvention and with Alex Garland (28 Days Later) behind the script, a remake could produce something interesting. So does the sparkly new trailer, released today, suggest a decent reinvention of the character?
Well. Hmm. No. Set in the future, the story follows Dredd (played by Karl Urban) a violent law enforcer who has to bring down a drug lord called Ma-Ma (Game of Thrones‘ Lena Headey) who is dealing out of her skyscraper apartment building. Coming along with Dredd is his rookie Anderson, played by Olivia Thirlby. The trailer features car chases, hand on hand combat and an awful lot of gun porn. To be honest, it all looks a bit dull.
From what looks like a plot ripped straight from the Indonesian martial arts film The Raid: Redemption and to the green screen backdrops, irritating slow-mo sequences and a futuristic smog filled cityscape, this is all stuff we have seen before. This trailer doesn’t capture the excitement from a basic visceral level and I can’t see it appealing to the intellect either. It looks a bit like Blade Runner… only Dreddful.
Dredd opens in (you guessed it) 3D on September 21st this year.
