Movie Reivew: “Dredd”

OVERALL: Reviewers said this movie was good. Friends said the movie was good. Holy Toledo Blades they were right!!! Judgement IS coming and has deemed this movie worthy of praise! (oh come on I had to)

POINTS: Action adventure movie WITH clever plot twists. I love it when the hero and the villain trade intelligent moves and have to react to each other. Plus I like it when you can understand how characters arrived at the information they use. I get really bugged in movies when characters know something or react to something that logically they wouldn’t know about in reality. I guess you can call that a continuity break and they drive me nuts. Never happens in Dredd. You can see everything and how it might play out and it is good. Huzzah to the script writers and director!
Also I truly believe that a good action adventure movie is good because you like the characters. If you have no investment in the characters who cares about the adventure? So to ensure we invest in the characters the director 1. Let the actors act and 2. Uses many beautiful close-ups so you can know and relate to the characters and see, if not feel, what they are experiencing. Very nice. I like it when directors let the actors work. 😉

PITFALLS: Hmm… Well personally I don’t do well with any story that says our future is bleak and hopeless. I really don’t do well when civilizations are way over populated – birth control much. But I enjoyed the movie anyway. I think I liked the fairness of the judges and how even in the very bad areas there was daily life going on with some love and kindness.

FEMALE CHARACTER(S): Oh Rookie, name: Anderson, you are so cool. You got to defy a few tropes and rules about female character sidekicks in action movies and seriously kicked backside in your own way. You weren’t fierce but you were driven and very very fair. 🙂 Awesome! Plus it was really great to see Dredd’s boss as a black woman. Oh Huzzah! And though you get the idea she is now a bureaucrat, you do get the feeling she could take the wall down with her pinkie fingernail if she wanted. 🙂

CULTURAL PITFALL(S): Like dodging bullets, this movie did a good job of dodging cultural pitfalls. It was good to see a wide variety of color in this movie – Dredd’s boss is a black woman – YAY!!! there are many black and white and brown and yellow characters through the movie. And they didn’t totally make Ma-Ma out to be the incredibly evil bad woman that villainesses usually get slammed into. For example, Ma-Ma doesn’t use her sexuality to control her minions. She does what the men do – she uses violence of all kinds including emotional and physical. Yes she is strong and controls people larger than her and wow, yes, she looks crazy dangerous. As in yes, crazy and can kill you with her crazy adrenaline rush and not be freaked by the bullets. When she faces Dredd at the end, she is totally on his level and he has to find a way out of her trap. Very cool.

HIGH POINT(S): 1. Dredd asks Rookie twice if she is ready. Ya’ gotta love one with the other. 🙂 2. Dred and Ma-Ma face off at the end. 3. Dredd’s boss is uber cool. 4. “Wait.” – Dredd. See the movie, you’ll know why it was a high point. 🙂 5. You never see Karl Urban’s face. 🙂 He’s all Dredd.