Movie Review: Dredd

Director: Pete Travis

Writers: John Wagner, Carlos Ezquerra, Alex Garland

Stars: Karl Urban, Olivia Thirlby, Lena Headey

Verdict: Good enough

Dredd is something that we don’t really see a lot these days. A dystopia that isn’t also a YA novel, (seriously Hollywood The Hunger Games and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire were good but why keep bothering?). It follows Karl Urban, (Star Trek), as the titular stony faced judge, tasked with taking a first timer out into the real world for assessment. Not the most revolutionary plot in the world, but then it becomes further complicated by the two of them becoming trapped in a high-rise on a drugs bust, and the residents are turned on the judges. Ok so it might be Training Day meets The Raid with a dash of Blade Runner thrown in, and a tonal whiff of RoboCop and High-Rise, and that would be fine, if it was as good as, if not better than, these classic films. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t elevate the material it’s riffing off in the same way as something like Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, or The Cabin in the Woods. 

Let’s just get this straight, the film is not bad. It’s actually quite good, but it’s serviceable at best. Now this isn’t the first movie based off of this property and my god is this film better then Judge Dredd but then again I don’t need to tell you that because well, it’s really not hard to be better than Judge Dredd is it? For a start Dredd never takes off his helmet. The Judge himself, Karl Urban, knows what the character is and his history, and plays up the gruffness and the chin to absurd levels, that verge on the comedic. And in the end I think that means the Robocop comparison really isn’t that far off because like Robocop this is some macabre comedy that in the way of Evil Dead II, gets a lot of it’s comedy just from how over the top and campy it is. When they want to eliminate the judges what do they do? The break out the mounted gattling guns and take out a whole floor. When you want to kill someone selling someone else’s drugs on your turf what do you do? You skin them, drug them with the film’s drug of the week slo-mo and drop them from 200 stories. The problem here is, is that when the film wants to be serious it feels incredibly flat. For example Lena Heady, (Game of Thrones) is great as the villain in any other movie of this type, she does play it incredibly straight, so when she’s on screen with Dredd it makes for an interesting dynamic but for most of the time she just comes across as not quite as funny as Jack Nicholson in The Departed. In truth it really does seem like Karl Urban and the filmmakers were the only ones in on the joke, because the violence is incredibly over the top in a very Robocop, Total Recall, Paul Verhoeven way.

I do love Alex Garland, (Ex_Machina, 28 Days Later…, Sunshine), but I feel like maybe his script didn’t quite understand that the over the top violent aspect was what people loved about the comics which may have caused some confusion. However he has done something right, all the best dystopian stories, from Blade Runner to 1984, just have a very personal, smaller story set inside a larger world, and they use that to help realise the world they’re in properly, which is why the trapped-in-a-highrise conceit works so brilliantly. And the film looks beautiful, if a bit over saturated, that may have been what they were going but for me it just doesn’t work. 

In the end it was unfortunate this film came out after The Raid because you can’t help comparisons, the action in the raid is beautiful and balletic and brutal and exciting, where as in Dredd it’s more like the head explosion in Scanners but slightly less fun, only slightly though. It has slow motion violence that’s similar to, but nearly as good as, the elevator sequence in Drive, and in the end all these comparisons are inevitable but unfortunate because I’m spending the whole movie thinking off all these movies I like more than Dredd. 

Movie Review: Hugo

Director: Martin Scorsese

Writers: John Logan,  Brian Selznick

Stars: Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz, Christopher Lee, Ben Kingsley, Ray Winstone, Emily Mortimer, Helen McCrory, Michael Stuhlbarg, Frances de la Tour, Richard Griffiths, Jude Law

Verdict: A beautiful family friendly treat

Hugo is an infamously family friendly (how often do you get to say that?) movie from the master of dark character studies Martin Scorsese, (Goodfellas, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street). It follows orphaned clock-making whizz kid Hugo Cabret with Asa Butterfield, (Ender’s Game, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) bringing to life the titular role. He steals from the wrong, old, curmudgeonly, embittered toy maker with a damaged heart of gold, Georges, played by the always mercurial and inimitable Ben Kingsley, (Gandhi, Schindler’s List, Sexy Beast), more than making up for Iron Man 3. Hugo lives in a train station patrolled by the warden, bought to life by Sacha Baron Cohen, (Borat, Les Misérables) in fine knockabout form. 

In fact the cast is star studded, and generally fantastic. Helen McCrory is an absolute standout, maybe the best performance in the movie, and it’s a travesty it’s really hard to find many credits for her beyond Draco Malfoy’s anonymous mother because she is a real talent. The cast is rounded out by; Chloë Grace Moretz, (Kick-Ass) doing her best ‘Chamber of Secrets‘ era Hermione Granger impression, Ray Winstone Ray-Winstone-ing, Emily Mortimer being at her most fabulous since The Newsroom, (and she’s normally pretty fabulous), Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour off doing their own little thing, fabulously, Michael Stuhlbarg bringing the same sense of childishness he did to A Serious Man but this time instead of a childish sense of impotence and naivety, he gives a sense of wonder and awe that matches the tone of the film perfectly, Jude Law as Hugo’s father doing that thing Jude Law does of just being really warm and likeable, when he’s not playing Dom Hemingway or Dan from Closer, and last but not least, Christopher Lee, who’s just, well, Christopher fucking Lee. 

It’s not like anyone thinks Martin Scorcese is a one trick pony, he’s pulled off fare that deviates from his usual tropes with period drama The Age of Innocence and Kundun which was scripted by Melissa Mathison of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and The BFG fame. And Hugo is very, very well directed, it’s interesting how Martin Scorcese, who’s been making films for decades, makes a film about the origins of cinema whilst effectively mixing old and new techniques; such as tableaux vivants and long tracking shots, arranged by an oscar winning Robert Richardson, (Django Unchained, Natural Born Killers, The Aviator), mixed with colour correction and a sepia tinted, computer generated vision of Paris, which also won oscars for it’s visual effects team. These go together to create the mood of classical era cinema with a contemporary polish, including that sense of joy for and love of the medium from films like Casablanca, Citizen Kane, and The Big Sleep, this is a joy which also infects the plot of the film and the viewer themselves. 

In the end that’s the joy of the film, the very tone of joy which leaps of the screen, and a heart warming story that’ll melt the iced over cynicism in anyone. The performances, the side stories of the side characters who inhabit the train station like it was their only home and existence which take on the form of something Chaplinesque. I shed a tear, and if you don’t you’re either a robot or really must have something against this film. The master that is Martin Scorcese adds another string to his bow with aplomb, and despite the classical sense the film has, shows he’s as burningly contemporary as Chris Nolan.