Things I like: Urban as Dredd, Urban as Dredd, Urban as Dredd. Seeing as how the character was envisioned by creators John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra as a post-apocalyptic Dirty Harry, Urban's raspy, Clint Eastwood impression works fine for me. Things I like less: For being in the middle of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Dredd's hometown of Mega-City One looks a little "normal" for my tastes, with not nearly the amount of urban decay one would expect. Here, it looks like Old Detroit in RoboCop, which is bad, but not bad enough.
That single, solitary pseudo-qualm notwithstanding, this does seem like a pretty effective translation of the character to the big screen, and I certainly hope it paves the way for a character whose appeal has always been fairly fringey to break out into the mainstream. That said, I also don't harbor any illusions about how well it's going to do. Globally, probably fine. Stateside, it'll tank. In fact, my guess is that it'll be lucky if it even manages to match the box office take from the last time they tried 'porting Dredd over to the screen:
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
Comments
I finally saw the whole film on a cable channel. Didn't help. Not only was it a film more cynical than the original RoboCop, it didn't even have any leavening humor. It seemed to me to be Brit-hate of America, even though it starred a reputed American. I can't imagine this attempt to reintroduce this dark a tale will do any good.