You're Probably Going To Have To Keep Waiting For a Good "Judge Dredd" Movie

The real problem with the first cinematic attempt at "Judge Dredd" was that they somehow managed to miss that the comics were supposed to be funny; a brutal satire of contemporary American culture and American action-hero archetypes as seen by Brits. It also wasn't quite violent or nihilistic enough, sure, but without the sense of humor it didn't matter either way - a proper "Judge Dredd" movie needs to be a celebration of "for-your-own-good" facism turned up to eleven in order to point out the inherent facism in "straight" versions of the no-nonsense supercop subgenre.

Below, the trailer for an attempted "reboot" of the franchise (now just called "Dredd") with Karl Urban doing his best Christian Bale Growl in the lead. They've certainly got the grit and the violence down, and supposedly this version of Dredd is never going to remove his helmet... but it looks like they've once again missed the whole damn point, the trailer offering zero indication that any level of humor or satire is present. Pity...



The elephant in the room for action nuts will likely be that this seems to have the exact same premise as "The Raid" (the two films were in-production around roughly the same time) but I kind of like that about it. Too many franchise movies mistake a travelogue for worldbuilding, and I like the idea of Dredd as the hero of a very specific action-movie setup.

The buzz on this, incidentally, is exceptionally bad - it shot ages ago, and the studio was supposedly so unhappy with the result that the original director was shut-out of an extensive reworking/overhaul in post-production (the producers have downplayed these rumors, suggesting that an "unconventional" approach to authorship of the film was part of the project from the beginning.)