Okay, let’s start with the basics. This is a comic book hero film. That’s the excuse for an action movie. The “universe” this takes place in has a city stretching from the Boston locale to where Washington D.C. was and is called very poetically, “Mega-City One.” It is walled in and surrounded by an irradiated desert. There must have been a nuclear war or something. Somehow it supports 800 million inhabitants and most of them seem to be third world refugees living awful lives surrounded by drugs, gangs and general depravity.
Law and order are in the hands of the “judges.” They are law enforcement officers who also can dispense justice as judge, jury and executioner at their own discretion. They ride around on motorcycles and have weapons that can dispense munitions ranging from standard bullets, to armor piercing rounds, to gas rounds to incendiary devices. They tend to kill a lot of criminals in the course of their work.
In this story a judge named Dredd is bringing a female rookie named Cassandra Anderson on a trial assignment. She also happens to be a psychic. This seems to be linked to her parents having died from the effects of radiation. She doesn’t wear her armored helmet the way Dredd does because it interferes with her psychic ability but mostly because we wouldn’t be able to see her blonde hair.
The gist of the story is that Dredd and Anderson have captured a member of the Ma-Ma Madrigal gang. Anderson can tell that he’s guilty of some recent murders so he’s being brought in for interrogation. But Ma-Ma knows that he would end up spilling the truth about her involvement in the deadly “slo-mo” drug distribution. So, they lock down the 200-story housing complex where she resides and traps the two judges inside. The rest of the story is Dredd’s fight to stay alive until help can arrive from outside.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
Alright, the spoiler alert is kind of silly. This is a comic book movie. Judge Dredd kills all his adversaries and ends the movie virtually the same as it begins, walking off to fight crime in Mega-City One. In between we meet Ma-Ma, her henchmen and a few of the hopelessly oppressed residents of Mega-City One. At the end of the movie Dredd approves Anderson’s probationary service. But when she hands in her shield at the end of her probation I couldn’t tell if she still wanted to do the work. Oh, and at the climax Dredd throws Ma-Ma Madrigal off the 200-story building to her death. Of course he did.
Alright, who is this movie for. Well, it’s for comic book movie fans. I guess most action movie fans will enjoy it. People who don’t like gratuitous gun violence probably won’t. By and large I’ll say I enjoyed it. It was mindless fun. A little crude and full of the usual vulgar language so not for kids but no harm for grownups. Your milage may vary.