After Sylvester Stallone's laughable 1995 attempt to bring the 2000 AD icon to the big screen, 2012's Dredd didn't exactly have to do much to be a significant improvement. Despite murmurs of production troubles (director Pete Travis was locked out of the editing process after disagreements with producers), Dredd turned out to be the gritty, R-rated adaptation of the classic comic we had all been longing for. Despite a modest $45 million budget, the movie benefited from excellent visual effects, and in particular some beautiful slow-motion photography used to portray the effects of the drug Slo-Mo. If the plot itself was frequently compared to The Raid, Dredd certainly had more on its mind than in that movie: the characters are fleshed out enough to be believable, and the performances, especially from Karl Urban as Dredd, Olivia Thirlby as Anderson and Lena Headey as Ma-Ma, were widely praised. And better yet, there isn't one second in this movie where Dredd takes his helmet off: victory! The movie scored well with critics (78%), but only made $41 million at the box office, making it a financial failure, even with the strong home video sales. Its status as a cult classic keeps the idea of a sequel very much alive, but clearly, not enough people are loving this movie if it couldn't even make its budget back at the cinema. It might not be high-art, but it's damn fun, and deserved a far more fruitful reception.
Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes).
General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.
