Dredd 3D

Doc, why do we always cut these things so close?

I've got to get cleaned and and go to work, but a quick moment on Dredd. Went to see it last Tuesday after an evening of coincidental meetings, cornbread and uh, chili type stuff, and learning this game where you build a pan asian train system. Pretty cool stuff.

Dredd was great- very simple, ridiculous story. The antagonist, Ma Ma, has almost certainly been in the comics at some point- Dredd's been around for 40 years, that's a lot of material, but there's little chance that she was ever anything but a minor villain character. The creators here eschewed the allure of the BIG movie, where the world is on the line, and the hero must fight his arch nemesis, who turns out to be his father, or long lost brother, or what.

How about a small story, showing how cool the larger than life (if not quite a "super hero"- I'd rather reserve that moniker for less kill-y guys) characters can be. A movie can barely contain a well fleshed out comic tale without becoming bloated to near collapse. And this movie got that! One could almost see this as a sort of anthology movie, like Matrix Animated or Gotham Knights, that after the credits are done rolling a whole new adventure will start with an entirely different stylistic bent.

It takes the pressure off the creators and audience both, and we get to sit back and have a blast.

Incidentally, I read that the story is basically "The Raid" but with Judge Dredd. Well, I didn't see The Raid, so this one was for me I guess.

One very weird bit to me is the fact that almost every move the bad guys made turned the hopeless situation into a marginally more possible one to live through. The best example being how Dredd was running low on the special ammo that his super gun runs on, then Ma Ma hires some crooked Judges to come in and take out Dredd. Well, they didn't last, and now Dredd has ammo again. Good job, Ma Ma.

Okay, off to work.