Total Recall (2012)

When I first heard that there would be a remake of Total Recall (1990), I was a little upset.  It might not be the most subtle movie (hint: Arnold), but it is a pretty awesome and ridiculous (hint: three-breasted lady) piece of action/sci-fi.  Why mess with a classic?  But then I thought it over.  This is a Philip K. Dick short story, so you could redo this film as a paranoid science fiction nightmare, like something Cronenberg would make.  Or you could play up the idea of someone not knowing their identity; it could be like The Bourne Identity, only in the future!  The only wrong way to remake Total Recall would be to try and out-action an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

Hmm...that trailer makes it look like they made the wrong choice.

By the end of the 21st century, the Earth has been reduced to a wasteland, following large-scale chemical warfare.  Only England and Australia remain inhabitable, although they are a tad overcrowded.  The teeming masses of Australia commute to England to work low-end jobs, while native English get the higher paying leadership positions.  Naturally, that leads to some complaints from the Australian servant class, and some domestic terrorism/freedom fighting has broken out.  Times are tense, but I know what you are wondering.  How can people commute across the globe on a regular basis?  If you guessed via a tunnel bored through the center of the planet, you defied logic and guessed right!  Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) is one of these menial Australian laborers.  While he has a home, a gorgeous wife, Lori (Kate Beckinsale), and a job, he is unsatisfied.  He has recurring dreams of another woman, with them on the run together from the government.

He's married to Beckinsale, but dreams of Biel.  Quaid is an ungrateful bastard.

Quaid keeps hearing about a company called Rekall.  It's a place where they implant fake memories that seem totally real, but aren't.  Essentially, it's a way for a boring person to remember an exciting life that they never had the opportunity/balls to actually experience.  Quaid decides to give it a try, and opts for the "secret agent" special.  But that's when things get bad, very fast.  Quaid already had his memories tampered with!  Now he's on the run from the police for something he doesn't understand, his wife is trying to kill him, and it appears that dream girl is actually a real person?!?  Is this all in Quaid's head, or is it really happening?

I vote real.  My imagination wouldn't come up with that dumb hairstyle.

The acting in Total Recall (2012) is pretty mediocre.  Nobody is fantastic, but nobody hams it up, either (which is probably an upgrade from the original film).  In the lead role, Colin Farrell looked suitably confused and he was convincing in his action scenes.  This role doesn't play to his strengths (thick brogue and empathetic eyebrows), but he plays a generic hero well enough.  Kate Beckinsale took on the role of the primary villain, which is a change of pace for her.  She doesn't actually seem evil, so much as she is paramilitary with crazy eyes.

Exhibit A

More than anything else, Beckinsale was cast to look hot and perform action stunts, which she handles easily.  Her role isn't very deep, but she does run around a lot to distract you from that fact.  Jessica Biel plays the part of the "good girl," which for all intents and purposes has her running for her life whenever she's onscreen.  I keep wanting Biel to show off some acting talent, but she can't seem to get past "mild alarm" in this role.

ACTING!

Bryan Cranston once again plays an authority figure in a film, and once again underwhelms when he is given generic characters.  The man can obviously act, but his movie roles don't show it.  This is the first time I have seen Bokeem Woodbine in a role that wasn't obviously sinister; he was fine playing a character part, but I think he's got enough charisma to carry a more complex role in a big movie.  Bill Nighy makes an all-too-brief appearance, probably due to his history with the director.  I love Nighy, but he is awfully boring when he plays seemingly normal people, and that's what he was here.  Rounding out the noteworthy cast, John Cho played the owner/operator of Rekall, which is a surprisingly minor role that didn't really require a recognizable actor.  Oh, and in case you were wondering, they did bring back the prostitute character with three breasts.  She's played by Kaitlyn Leeb, and the extra breast appears to be fake.  Maybe.

This is only director Len Wiseman's fourth effort behind the camera (and his first since 2007), but it's hard to tell.  Wiseman (best known for the Underworld series) slips effortlessly back into glossy action movie-mode with Total Recall (2012).  There is a metric crap-ton of action in this movie, and it all looks great.

Although it sometimes seems like an excuse to check out his wife's butt

Wiseman is not known for his storytelling skills, though, and that shows.  Total Recall (2012) is effectively one long chase scene.  The smarter elements in the plot --- the mind games and the interesting science fiction aspects --- are lost among the countless shootouts and explosions.  When he slows down to play up some of the supposedly less exciting elements, they're pretty cool, but sadly underused.

A hand-video-phone?  That's awesome!

Wiseman is also not much of an actor's director, which can be seen by the fact that his entire cast is one-dimensional.  I can't blame him for the script, but any character development --- at all --- would have been appreciated.  Story logic would have helped out a bit, too.  I couldn't have been the only person who realized that Kate Beckinsale's character is a covert agent out to capture one man, and yet she destroys more buildings and cannon fodder characters than the entire cast of Terminator 3.  That was not terribly covert.

...but she apparently enjoyed every minute of it

Total Recall (2012) is definitely a well-produced film, and it is undoubtedly full of action.  None of that means anything if the characters suck, though.  Well, I suppose that's not entirely true; if the action is ridiculous enough, it can balance out terrible characters, but that's not the case here.  Let's take one of the many chase scenes as a for instance:

Okay, this is a little reminiscent of Minority Report, but looks exciting enough.  When you look back on the film, though, this scene just blends in with dozens more that feel just like it.  However, ten seconds of Quaid at Rekall plant a lasting image in your mind.

Planting courtesy of Rekall

That is the most frustrating aspect of Total Recall (2012) --- it has some very cool sci-fi ideas and moments, but exclusively emphasizes the dumb action movie parts. As far as dumb action movies go, Total Recall is decently made.  It's nothing special, but it moves almost fast enough to keep the audience from noticing plot holes.  It's not very original, though, even for a remake.  Generic action sequences give way to homages to Minority Report, Blade Runner, and the 1990 original, but none of them are particularly clever or fun (except for tri-breast, which still makes me laugh every time). 

Cue fight scene 27

It was an incredibly poor choice to try an out-do the action in a remake of a film starring THE action star of the last 30 years, but the filmmakers didn't fail.  They were just adequate and bland.  And when you're being compared to something that was --- whatever your take on it --- unique, being boring looks even worse by comparison.  I thought about knocking this movie down a few notches for falling short of the original, but it's really a decent mindless action movie.  It should have been more, but it's perfectly mediocre for what it is.

FDR: American Badass!

I watched FDR: American Badass! for the same reason that anyone else would: the title sounded funny and I had fifteen minutes to kill before I had to swap out my loads of laundry.  I wasn't looking for anything particularly good to watch (and a good thing, too), but I figured that the premise would keep me entertained for a few moments.  Then I realized what the premise of this movie was.

That's right, FDR: American Badass! is the amazing true story of how Franklin Roosevelt conquered the united werewolf forces of the Axis Powers, while dropping an unholy amount of polio jokes.

It all began when Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Barry Bostwick) was just the Governor of New York.  While on a hunting trip with friends, they were attacked by a werewolf, who bit Frank on the leg and gave him "the polio."  FDR never walked again.

Above: polio face, I assume

As time went on, FDR eventually became President of the United States.  After several minutes of possibly trying to keep the US out of World War II, he decided to help the only European country that speaks English (they specify that Ireland does not count) and takes on Hitler and Mussolini (Paul Ben-Victor) by his lonesome.  By the way, Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito are all werewolves.

Fact.

There's really no point discussing the acting quality in FDR: American Badass!  It's really, really fucking stupid.  As such, you can really only grade the actors on how funny or unfunny they are.  Barry Bostwick deserves all the credit for making this movie as nearly watchable as it is.  He put in a lot of effort to stretch out a very simple gag, and he wasn't afraid to act foolishly in the process.

Example: Bostwick, covered in buttermilk, humping a pitcher

Bruce McGill wasn't bad as a straight man, but this is not exactly a movie that requires a setup for its gags.  There are actually a surprising number of recognizable faces in this cast.  Lin Shaye, Ray Wise, William Mapother, and Paul Willson all play small parts, and all of them have their chance to say or do something crude. Keri Lynn Pratt, who I honestly don't dislike, once again played a ditzy whore quite well.  Deon Richmond also played the part he is most well-known for: the black guy in a stupid comedy.  The only person who really stood out was Kevin Sorbo as the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, brought on by exceedingly strong marijuana.  I've never seen Sorbo flex his comedic muscles before, but he was surprisingly fun to watch as an herb-loving, super-chill Presidential ghost.

Of course he can fly

How can I try to objectively criticize the writing and directing of FDR: American Badass!?  The title alone lets most people know whether they will love or hate this movie.  For those of you on the fence, though, I believe that there are at least sixteen solid minutes of comedy in this film.  Unfortunately, the movie is 93 minutes long.  Still, director Garrett Brawith keeps a pretty solid pace and encourages the actors to ham it up to an appropriate degree.  Ross Patterson's script makes no attempt to be anything other than crude and stupid, and he does it frequently enough that there are guaranteed to be a few truly funny moments.  

Wheelchair of Death

In other words, if you've ever wanted to hear Franklin Roosevelt use the phrase "a bag full of dicks at a lesbian convention," then this is your film.  Of course, the odds of you actively wanting to hear that particular phrase are pretty slim, so this is probably a niche audience.  Not as niche as the people who want to see FDR receive sexual gratification from someone licking ketchup and mustard off his polio-stricken legs, but it's still a small audience.

Fact: this scene was recreated from an official White House photo

I guess the only question that matters is whether or not FDR: American Badass! is a good film or not.  It's not.  Just kidding!  Not about the quality of the movie --- it's obviously trash --- but about the important question: the question should be whether or not this movie is funny.  The answer, surprisingly, is "sometimes."  I hate most comedies, and I loathe the current crop of pop-culture spoofs that make up most of the successful comedies nowadays.  I expected to laugh at how bad FDR: American Badass! was, but I found myself actually laughing with the movie at times.  It's tedious to watch all of this movie (I would recommend ten-minutes at a time), but in small doses, it can actually be kind of fun.

Like FDR at an orgy

Sure, it makes the same jokes over and over.  Yes, it relies on crude humor far too often (and the novelty of old people using hip-hop slang at all).  But there are some genuinely funny ideas buried under all the crap they used to pad this movie.  This would have made a hysterical fake movie trailer, and a funny fifteen-minute short.  But it's a feature-length film, and the jokes wear thin.  FDR: American Badass! is not good, but it is better than it should be. 

At the time of this post, FDR: American Badass! didn't have much information available on the internet.  How little, you ask?  There's not even a Wikipedia page for it!  I didn't know that was even possible.

Seven Psychopaths

I'm a sucker for Sam Rockwell.  When you add in Christopher Walken and Woody Harrelson, you have just created a film that I will watch, regardless of the story.  So why try to get around it?  Check out the red band trailer for Seven Psychopaths:

Judging from the trailer, Seven Psychopaths is writer/director Martin McDonagh's attempt to make a fast-paced heist movie, along the lines of Snatch, but in English and with better dialogue.  McDonagh's first film (he is also a playwright) was the surprisingly enjoyable In Bruges; at first glance, it looks like he was trying to keep the humor, but up the pace with his follow-up.  And there is nothing wrong with that approach --- I bet McDonagh could make one hell of a great breakneck crime flick.  But that's not what he's going for with Seven Psychopaths, although it takes a little while for that to become clear to the audience.

Although there are hints that things will get weird

Marty (Colin Farrell) is a successful screenwriter suffering from writer's block.  The script he is working on is titled "Seven Psychopaths," but he's having trouble actually coming up with any characters.  That's where Billy (Sam Rockwell) comes in.  Billy is Marty's best friend, but he's not a particularly good influence.  Instead of working, Billy and Hans (Christopher Walken) kidnap dogs and then collect reward money when the owners post flyers around the neighborhood.  Billy is trying to help Marty finish his script, although nothing seems to be working.  That's why Billy puts an ad in the paper for psychopaths to contact Marty to tell him their stories.  

...which ultimately leads to Tom Waits carrying a bunny during a firefight

Meanwhile, it seems that Billy and Hans have made a mistake in their choice of dognappings.  Instead of a spoiled trophy wife's pet, they picked up a shih tzu belonging to a violent mob boss (Woody Harrelson).

That would be pretty bad, but they could theoretically give the dog back on the sly and hopefully avoid any violent repercussions.  Well, they could if Billy was a rational human being.  By holding on to the dog, the mob boss is able to identify the dognappers and send his underlings out to kill them.  Unless there happens to be some other psychopath on the loose, killing killers (and there is!).  So what do we wind up with?  A homicidal criminal out for revenge, a random killer on the loose, a confused and mostly drunk writer, an idiotic dognapper, and Christopher Walken.  And that is when the story takes an unusual turn, a metafictional turn that is better experienced than explained.

This is what you expect, but you get something slightly different

The acting in Seven Psychopaths is some of the better comedic work I have seen in a while.  As the mostly normal point-of-view character, Colin Farrell does a great job being surprised and helpless; he is mainly reacting to the other actors here, but he's refined the acting capabilities of his eyebrows as he's gotten older.  Sam Rockwell, as usual, was a bizarre delight.  Rockwell plays goofy exceedingly well, but he is exceptional when given a good script.  Christopher Walken was unmistakably Christopher Walken.  Some might argue that he's leaning into self-parody territory these days, but I love seeing him in good movies --- especially ones where his weirdness doesn't stand out more than anybody else's.

If I walked into my home and found Christopher Walken, I would expect him to look like this

Woody Harrelson clearly benefited from a script full of amusingly foul things to say.  Harrelson is a good actor, but he's at his best when playing up his comedy roots, and he does absurd comedy as well as anybody in mainstream Hollywood.

"Somebody cast me in a Coen Brothers movie!  A comedy, this time!"

The rest of the cast has what amounts to featured cameos.  Some of them, like Abbie Cornish, Olga Kurylenko and Harry Dean Stanton, don't get to do much, although their parts move the plot forward.  Others, like Michael Pitt, Gabourey Sidibe and Kevin Corrigan, receive little screen time but compensate by having chunks of pretty great dialogue.  Even the actors playing straight roles, like Zeljko Ivanek, turn in quality character work.  Of all the supporting cast, Tom Waits has the meatiest and strangest role, although it is easily the least bizarre movie role I have seen of his.  It's always a pleasant surprise when you watch a movie and see only good acting in it, and it's a treat seeing an ensemble cast having this much fun.

More entertaining than it appears

Martin McDonagh clearly has a talent for getting the best from his actors, although the more readily apparent skill would be writing awesome dialogue.  Here's where McDonagh succeeds where Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarentino often fail: he actually develops his one-dimensional characters.  It would have been extremely easy to make Marty the soul of this movie --- he's the only remotely normal main character, after all --- but he went out of his way to show the pain of almost every goofy-ass character in this script. 

Exception noted, Mr. Harrelson

The technical side of the film was all done well enough (I liked the cinematography, although it was never too showy), but it is the writing that stands out the most. 

That is a good thing and a bad thing.  The good side I have already explained --- funny script, unexpected depth, etc. --- but the bad side comes into play about halfway through the film.  It gets meta.  I'm not a huge fan of metafiction, but I can appreciate when it is done well.  Thankfully, Seven Psychopaths doesn't screw it up or get too pretentious.  This is probably my favorite metafictional movie since Adaptation.  It's not that the movie has a metafictional aspect to it that bothers me --- it's that that aspect doesn't really come into play until the film is half over.  It felt like the script suddenly sobered up at the 45-minute mark and decided to put off the predictably silly and violent ending that it was so clearly heading toward in the first half of the film.  Had the meta been more prevalent earlier in the movie (or less prevalent later), this would have been far more effective.  Still, Seven Psychopaths is a blast to watch.

Resident Evil: Retribution

After so many installments, it is getting harder and harder to overlook some basic problems with the Resident Evil franchise.  With the fifth (I know!) volume, Resident Evil: Retribution, I have to point out upfront what has ruined my suspension of disbelief: I have a hard time buying into an international evil organization, hell-bent on ruining the world that manages to keep finding glove-tight leather outfits for Milla Jovovich to kick ass in.  We're four movies into a global zombie apocalypse, and they still have someone working a bondage/tailoring shop?  Sure, it's obviously a solid investment when the zombie apocalypse comes a-knocking --- What would Milla wear, otherwise?  Capris? --- but you think somebody would at least brag about having the foresight for this eventuality.  If this was my movie, that would be the only thing discussed in the trailer.

***DISCLAIMER: The plot of Resident Evil: Retribution is pretty damn ridiculous, so forgive me if I simplify or gloss over some of the finer points in this plot summary***

When last we left Alice (Milla Jovovich), she was on an aircraft carrier, about to take on the forces of the evil Umbrella Corporation.

This picture perfectly encapsulates all Resident Evil plots

The next thing you know, Alice has woken up to an idyllic suburban life, where she has a husband and a child.  But then zombies happen.  Again.  The next thing you know (again), Alice wakes up in an unnecessarily bright and clean room, wearing only a small towel.  Why a towel?  Did she slip and hit her head coming out of the shower?  Are her hot pants at the cleaner?  Is this just a subtle clue that the zombie virus began with mildew accumulating in Milla's towel because she can't be bothered to hang it up like a grown damn woman, and I sure as shit don't need to keep picking up after her --- if she really respected me, she wouldn't be so thoughtless in the shared space of our bathroom, right?

Stained-glass floors.  Classy touch, evil corporation.

Actually, that stupid idea is only slightly less reasonable than the shoulder shrug reasoning of the actual script.  Although having the entire Resident Evil franchise be the concussed dream of Alice, after a bathroom-related head injury, would be pretty hilarious.  Anyway, the villain of the last four films, Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), has taken the time to bleach his hair.  Almost as importantly, Wesker tells Alice that he is no longer part of the evil Umbrella Corporation.  Now he wants to help humanity, which makes as much sense as anything else in this series.  It seems that The Umbrella Corporation has been taken over by a virtual intelligence called the Red Queen.

Note: the worst CGI in this series is for a computer-generated character

Umbrella and the Queen have captured Alice and cloned the crap out of her and a lot of other people (many we have seen in previous Resident Evil movies), running simulation after simulation, and using Alice's unique physiology (I think) to perfect the zombie disease.  Wesker wants to help Alice escape the of-course-it's-underwater Umbrella station she is in, so he sends in some help, in the form of Ada Wong (Bingbing Li).  All the two of them have to do is fight their way across three city-sized zombie experiments and meet up with Wesker's extraction team. 

That sounds easy enough

There are a lot of returning characters to Resident Evil: Retribution, but the acting is at the level the series is known for (hint: the bar is not set high).  This is actually Milla Jovovich's best work in the series to date, as she not only kicks ass and looks sexy, but she also manages to deliver a few one-liners.  It's not impressive work by most standards, but for an actress as wooden as Jovovich, it is worth noting.  How about the rest of the cast?  Well, there are some newcomers.  Bingbing Li is pretty and wore some fantastically inappropriate clothes for fighting zombies, but it all of her dialogue was dubbed over in post-production.  And it looked like it, too.

An evening dress is a solid choice for outrunning zombies, right?

Aryana Engineer was adequate as the completely useless little girl that Alice took with her, but she was less of a character and more of a plot device.  Johann Urb played Leon Kennedy, the main character from the fifth RE video game, and he has a little less characterization than your average video game character; in case his haircut bothers you, that was also inspired by the game.  Kevin Durand also plays a character from the games.  While his role in the movie seemed somewhat minor, I thought Durand did a solid job as an unnecessarily macho character.  The returning cast sees Sienna Guillory, Shawn Roberts, and Boris Kodjoe survive the last film, with Michelle Rodriguez, Oded Fehr, and Colin Salmon having their now-dead characters cloned, with Fehr and Rodriguez doing double duty as both "good" and "bad" clones. On the whole, there is less "acting" in this movie than there is "shouting until something explodes," but that is to be expected.  Nobody (except for Li) was embarrassingly bad, but this is a movie about a supermodel who fights zombies in a leather bodysuit --- good acting was never in the cards.

Thankfully, "posing with weapons" was

Luckily, writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson was well aware of that fact, and made a movie that played to both the franchise's and his own strengths: CGI action sequences.  If you're looking for ninety minutes of mindless action sequences, Resident Evil: Retribution may be the film for you.  Anderson has a knack for making Jovovich look like a formidable action hero, and his production of action scenes is some of the smoothest in the business right now.  That doesn't make up for his shortcomings as a screenwriter, but at least he's not spending a lot of time trying and failing to have these characters force emotions or a lot of hammy jokes.  

Although a "women driving" line would have been good here

After watching this film with Danny O'D, we both reached the same conclusion with regards to Paul W.S. Anderson's talents: it's not that he's a good director or anything, but it is nice that he keeps making action movies for Milla Jovovich to be a sex object in.  She's not exactly old here, but how many other 37-year old actresses have this kind of opportunity to kill fake things and be ogled by audiences in genuinely profitable films?  The answer, obviously, is "not enough."  Hollywood has failed to generate a new generation of dumb action heroes as Stallone and Schwarzenegger have aged into irrelevance, so why not make some scripts for aging (by Hollywood standards) beauties that may or may not have acting talent?  Just retool an old Chuck Norris movie for someone like Jennifer Love-Hewitt or Jenny McCarthy and have them fight Communist zombie ninjas.  How hard is that?  It's obviously working for Kate Beckinsale.

Note: I would also watch Michelle Rodriguez fighting Nazi alien terrorists

Okay, so Resident Evil: Retribution isn't a legitimately good movie.  How is it in terms of action movies, or at least the other Resident Evil movies?  The action certainly looks good in Retribution, and there is an awful lot of it.  But there is also a lot of stupid plotting, despite the fact that this movie feels like an hour and a half of mindless action.  Did this story need to keep tabs on Leon Kennedy and the other gun-toting "characters" that were meeting up with Alice?  Absolutely not.  Did we need Alice to care for a child?  Lord, no.  How about changing the villain in the series out of absolutely nowhere?  That was only slightly less stupid than filling the cast with recognizable actors who were "only" clones, and therefore perfectly expendable.
  Look, the less attention you pay to this horrible excuse for a story (example: whatever happened to Ali Larter and Wentworth Miller after the last movie, anyway?), the better off you are.

More of this, less of deaf children

However, even glossing over the plot doesn't make this film a must-see.  The best action movies have cool heroes doing cool things that kill bad guys.  The action scenes in Retribution are very smooth and generally look pretty good and lots of bad guys die, but these scenes don't always make a lot of sense.  That wouldn't be a huge knock on the movie, but Alice is a dull heroine.  When you add zero charisma to nonsensical action and a terrible plot, you get a sub-par movie.  Still, this is a movie about a zombie-killing woman in a vacuum-sealed catsuit; it may not be great, but it at least plays up what it does well. 

Within the Resident Evil series, I would say that Retribution is slightly worse than Resurrection, but still a little better than Apocalypse.  Given the $220 million Resident Evil: Retribution has made, it looks like we'll be seeing a sixth Milla RE movie soon.  With any luck, it will be a little less idiotic and a little more sensational.  And then, most likely, we'll see a reboot two years later.

Dredd

As we all are quite aware, these are the days of high-profile franchise reboots/re-imaginings/just-plain-remakes.  Not that Hollywood has ever been a bastion of creativity, mind you, but there do seem to be a lot of these things floating around nowadays.  Like many people, I tend to treat these reboots with cynicism.  When I heard about Dredd (the remake of Judge Dredd), though, I was all for it.  Why?  Because the Stallone/Schneider movie is terrible.  If you're going to remake a movie, it's easier to improve a crappy one than a classic.

Man, the future sucks.  Most of the world is an irradiated wasteland.  Everyone left in America lives in Mega-City One, a sprawling concrete jungle that runs from Boston to Washington, DC.  Older buildings are left to decay, while super-skyscraper tenements house much of the population.  There are 17,000 crimes reported in the city each day, and there is only enough manpower in the police force to respond to 6% of those calls.  The police of Mega-City One are called Judges, and are allowed to act as judge, jury and executioner for any crime they come upon.  Dredd is the story of just another day for one such Judge, Judge Dredd (Karl Urban).

In the future, the police will smell all your farts and hold you accountable

Judge Dredd is given a probationary officer named Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) to assess.  Normally, Anderson would not be up for evaluation, as she failed her basic Judge testing --- but she happens to be the most powerful psychic on record, and the Department of Justice wants to make use of that talent.  The first crime Dredd and Anderson respond to is a triple homicide at the Peach Tree super-tenement.  What starts out as a simple murder bust quickly gets out of hand when the local drug lord, Ma-Ma (Lena Headey) decides to make the entire 200-story building a war zone, with hundreds of people gunning for the Judges.

Trust me, these civilians are not as nice as they look

The acting in Dredd was a bit of a surprise to me, and I mean that in a good way.  Karl Urban did a good job deadpanning his way through this role; this is a part that was never meant for character development, and Urban kept steady throughout the film.  I was surprised that he never removed his helmet during the film, but swallowing his vanity helped keep Dredd the unemotional Dirty Harry clone that he should be.  I was even more impressed by  Olivia Thirlby.  She had the unpleasant job of being the rookie character that is going to be squeamish and stupid and wrong all the time, and yet she was surprisingly effective at providing an emotional core to this film.  I don't know if Dredd needed an emotional core, but it has one, and it was handled well.  Lena Headey was also very good as the wicked Ma-Ma.  Headey is becoming one of the better evil bitches in Hollywood, and she convincingly held her own in this ultra-macho action movie.

A beautiful woman that isn't treated as a sex object in an action movie: how novel!

Wood Harris was solid as a mean thug, and Domhnall Gleeson was pretty good as a weenie computer tech guy, but even they were essentially props for the three main characters to work around.  Still, I can honestly say that I enjoyed three actors in the remake of Judge Dredd.  How bizarre is that?

Dredd was directed by Pete Travis, and it is the first film of his I've seen.  He made some solid choices with Dredd.  While it is tempting to show off all sorts of technology and cool stuff when making a dystopian future film, Travis wisely chose to narrow this film's focus and keep the ball rolling.  The majority of the story happens inside the Peach Tree skyscraper, and the idea of the Judges being hunted by the inhabitants of Peach Tree is in place by the 30-minute mark.  The rest of the movie is a firefight, and the earlier half-hour was also action-packed. 

The storyboards for this scene just read "traffic"

Travis showcases the action well, but he also does a good job at pacing the film, throwing the Judges into one shitstorm after another.  That would have been more than enough to make this better than Judge Dredd, but Travis also added some humanity (via Anderson's character) and did some very cool work with the slow-motion sequences, too.  I loved that the slow-motion was utilized as part of the story, and the refracted light in those scenes was a nice touch. 

Slow-motion as part of the story?  Someone needs to tell Zack Snyder!

Of course, having Dredd shoot people while they are high on a drug that makes them see slow-motion rainbows also helps make this movie what it is.  To sum it up, I plan on seeing the next Pete Travis action movie in theaters.

In a movie about police officers who are allowed and encouraged to kill criminals, the main attraction for Dredd is always going to be the action.  And Dredd delivers.  This is a rare beast in the modern cinema jungle: an honest-to-goodness body count movie.  There are so many kills that I stopped counting within the first fifteen minutes.  With so many death scenes, they are not all going to be examples of gory excess, but there are some spectacular examples of bad-ass glorification of violence.  How about a slow-motion bullet to the face?

...or, possibly, a retro advertisement for Gushers?

If that doesn't do it for you, perhaps you would like a bullet that lights a fire inside a criminal's skull?

When I am police chief, we will call this ammo "default"

Dredd is easily the most violent movie of 2012 that I have seen, and it is also among the best action movies of the year.

Dredd probably isn't going to win over any new fans, though.  The ultra-violence can be a turn-off, and there is oodles of it.  There were some unexpected gems in this film, things that curious viewers will appreciate if they choose to watch.  For starters, the science-fiction in this movie is handled with a soft touch.  Sure, the Judges have guns that respond to voice commands, but most of the futuristic technology is subtle and left unexplained.  This film hints at a world with interesting bio-implants and bizarre tattoos, but the filmmakers were content to leave those stories unexplained, as background dressing.  Even more impressive was the portrayal of women.  Most of the time, women in action movies are there to look pretty and (fingers crossed) find their way into various stages of undress.  Not in Dredd.  Both female leads are tough, strong, and essentially asexual; that works even better with Judge Dredd, because he is equally asexual. 

"I get hard for the law"

They are just three tough people, trying to shoot the hell out of some folks.  Dredd also brings with it one of my favorite martial arts movie tropes: the building full of bad guys.  This is underutilized in English-speaking films.  Why go to exotic locations, when you can keep everything compact and tense, with literally hundreds of potential enemies?  I love action movies that don't bother with elaborate excuses and just go for the action.

I can't say that Dredd is exactly what it needs to be, though, even though I like a lot of things about it.  There are some minor visual complaints, like the fact that it was very difficult to differentiate between Judges during a fight scene.

At least two of these are not Karl Urban, that's all I can say for sure

The bigger problem for me was the lack of humor in the script.  I don't mean to imply that I missed Rob Schneider by any means, but this material deserves more dark humor.  Urban did a great job delivering his lines with a spot-on deadpan.  All he needed was a script that made some of the lines just a little bit funnier.

Genuine appreciation, or does the frown show ironic approval of a bad parent?  You decide.

That's not much of a complaint, when you think about the source material.  Dredd could have been utter trash.  Easily.  Instead, it is an unrelenting action movie with enough violence for three shoot-em-ups.  There's a fine line between nonstop action and brainless blood orgy, but Dredd toes the line with style and winds up one of the year's biggest surprises.