Film review: Dredd

After shooting Endgame in 2009, the film about the talks that led to South Africa's democracy, director Pete Travis returned to our shores for Dredd, a film based on the cult comic , Judge Dredd. The film was shot in Cape Town studios with Johannesburg standing in for the post-apocalyptic Mega-City One where criminals roam the streets and the only force for order is a group of urban cops called judges who fulfil the roles of judge, jury and on-spot executioners.

Fans of the British comic strip created in 1977 will be far happier with Travis' version of the Mega-City One hero than they were with the horribly camp 1995 film starring Sylvester Stallone. Karl Urban brings a quiet bulk and grim-faced presence to the masked enforcer, never taking off his helmet and delivering his lines in the suitably gruff and chopped tones expected of the judge.

There's a new drug epidemic spreading through Mega-City One - and it is up to Dredd and telepathic rookie Cassandra to take on the gang at the head of the distribution of "Slo Mo," a drug which makes users experience life at a fraction of its normal speed. The gang in question is led by the sadistic, scarred beauty Ma-Ma - who cares nothing for human life and enjoys inflicting pain. Slo Mo also provides Travis with the opportunity to create quite beautiful and strange 3-D effects intended to convey the experience of its users.

While the film begins well enough and it is both pleasing and a little alarming to see how easily Johannesburg fits the image of a bad-ass future city full of chancers and crooks, there's a point at which the claustrophobia of the setting of the story becomes difficult to appreciate and everything descends into a series of banal action setpieces full of guns of varying sizes.

As a story of cops versus druglords there's not much here to make it more than a B-movie with some interesting special effects set in a bleak future. The violence of the comic books is quickly dulled on screen - after all, how many squelches and bloody mutilations can cover up the holes at the centre of the tale? My guess is less than 10 and there are more than that here by several hundred rounds of ammunition. Dredd fans will be happy that Travis has kept the savage nature and high doses of gore that characterise the comic books intact.

The characters are skin deep, which is a recurring problem in comic book adaptations, but there's not even an attempt here to do anything about it. The environment and 3D trip recreations can't manufacture the kind of empathy that's needed to get us to invest in the story, especially those of us who aren't diehard Dredd-heads. A reasonable cast, a director with dramatic chops and a screenwriter (Alex Garland, the author of The Beach) who knows how to inventively mix a good gimmick and a story hasn't created much more than a lacklustre Robocop rework for the 21st century. Perhaps if you're a Dredd fan you might take all of this as the ranting of an idiotic non-appreciator of the seventh-greatest comic book character of all time. If so, then like the character, you'll have to judge for yourself.

'Dredd' 3D opens at cinemas nationwide today