Dredd

Judge Dredd comics are very hard things to translate to another medium. The overall bleak, nihilistic and yet blackly humorous ‘Ho-hum, let’s just get on with it despite all this violence’ tone needs a lot of contextualising. The previous attempt with Stallone didn’t work at all, but had a campy charm. On the other hand, this one, while it may not have had the horrible matter-of-fact shots of dead bodies going into recyc machines that have endured with me since early childhood, it managed to maintain the tone of bleak hopelessness and casual violence while introducing a perfect little humanising element – the young, sensitive rookie being taken out with Dredd for her first day. It gives the audience someone to empathise with while letting Dredd maintain his icy cool attitude.

The plot, written by The Beach and The Tesseract author Alex Garland, who seems to have given up on novels in favour of scriptwriting, was actually very simple, to the point it felt to me like a half-hour episode of a TV series fleshed out rather than a large-scale movie plot, and honestly I wasn’t at all impressed by the idea at the end, where a device has to transmit a signal rather than what it triggered simply happening when the signal stops, which is what anyone in Mama’s situation would have opted for. Still, the small scale was clearly intentional, to allow for the world to soak in. But I think a bit more of a chance could have been taken expanding the storyline outside its location, perhaps to the justice headquarters or some narcotics refinery outside, just to give more of a sense of scale, even if it meant sacrificing that neat conclusion.

The result is that the film is entertaining and satisfying – and of course very gory – but ultimately doesn’t feel like it’s o much of a scale and thus feels a long way from memorable, which is its main fault. Still, if I’ll remember anything from the film, it’s the beautiful ultra-slow-motion scenes of water droplets – and the chilling ideas the gang members have for using the drug that induces a feeling of time passing incredibly slowly…

The Expendables, then, which was our film for the sort-of party yesterday. I wanted to put on The Expendables in particlar because (a) we could largely ignore it and I knew nothing we put on was going to get watched seriously, and (b) I kinda wanna see the silly sequel so needed to watch the silly first film. No need for a decent review – basically, a bunch of huge names of 80s and 90s action films get together, then Sylvester Stallone, Jet Li, Dolf Lundgren, Jason Statham and Terry Crews (whose ridiculous ‘muscle music’ video for Old Spice I recently had hysterics over) go and overthrow a South American dictatorship with only Stone Cold Steve Austin to stand in their way. Mickey Rourke also turns up as the behind-the-scenes man. They essentially blow a lot of stuff up, fight a lot, have a car chase and win in the end. What more do you need from this action piece?

I was only a little sad it wasn’t the ensemble piece it was set up to be. Stallone was the only big, nostalgic name to be featured throughout. Jet Li was an action star but doesn’t have the stature of the big names that made the project appealing, Statham and Crews are really new to being called ‘stars’ and Dolph Lundgren was always a step below the big, big names. Of those biggest names, it unfortunately turned out that Willis and Schwarzenegger only had the smallest of cameos and even then in a scene with Stallone where they were conspicuously never all sharing the same shot, making me doubt all three were even in the same room at any point. Doing a little Googling, this seems too have been a common observation.

But hey. It’s dumb fun and taken in that context was hilarious. ‘Porn for action fans’ is probably right. It was never meant to be anything but silly and enjoyable, and that’s exactly what it was. And the sequel includes  Van Damme and the remarkably old Chuck Norris. Sign me up!