20 Great Movie Remakes With One Miscast Role

Pete Travis took Alex Garland’s script and gave us a Judge Dredd we could depend on in 2012, pushing the memory of Sylvester Stallone’s stale take on the character out of our minds and going full 2000 AD. Karl Urban plays the titular Judge, a warden of the dystopian Mega-City One, whose job it is to serve as judge, jury, and executioner for the scum on his streets.

Called in to bring order to a 200-storey high-rise, Dredd has to battle his way through level after level of dealers, heavies and nasties before he can get his hands on ex-hooker and current drug lord Ma-Ma (Lena Headey), who lives atop the tower and keeps the neighbourhood under her control with drugs, money, and violence.

The job’s a good 'un, and there’s not a comics fan out there who will say Dredd doesn’t feel authentic and exciting, or indeed that Urban wasn’t the perfect man for the job. But Headey’s performance leaves something to be desired.

We know Headey has the chops to play a truly sinister villain (per Game of Thrones), and the character design and makeup are spot on, but somehow these things don’t come together in her performance. Yes, she can be somewhat forgiven for chewing the scenery as this is a comic book adaptation, but at the same time, her character feels wishy-washy, thus never either settling fully into the Joker-like mania nor the more nuanced character her background suggests.