Dredd is one of the most successful comic book to film adaptations I've ever encountered. Sure, it's not 100% faithful to the source material, but the tone, characters, and style are just right. Screenwriter Alex Garland spins some well-worn tropes for police/action films into something that feels unique, even when blatantly lifted from other sources. The universe of Dredd is an interesting dystopia. There are no more courts. The police officers are referred to as judges because they capture, interrogate, and punish criminals on the spot. Judge Dredd is assigned a new trainee, Anderson, on an investigation into an apartment tower run by notorious criminal mastermind Ma-Ma. Anderson, who has possessed psychic abilities since she was a young girl, and Dredd get trapped by Ma-Ma's high tech security and must fight their way to the top with their suspect to dispense justice.
The glaring issue in the film is one of familiarity. The plot and premise appear to be lifted from The Raid: Redemption, which came out in the US around the same time Dredd was about to go into production. The mob-run apartment complex, the layers of enemies, the death traps, and the manipulation of tenants for survival are lifted wholesale from the far more successful Thai action film.
With that said, Dredd can stand on its own as an action film. The interesting part of this story is not the mob trap but the universe itself. Dredd and Anderson are after the distribution chain for SLO-MO, an inhalant that causes the user to feel like time is slowing down and light reflects off of every surface. The Judges discover that Ma-Ma's lackeys are using SLO-MO on people they want to disappear. They force them to puff on the pipe and throw them off the top of the apartment complex for a violent yet painless death.
Director Pete Travis and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle do not let you miss one gory detail of these sequences. SLO-MO looks gorgeous onscreen, giving a narrative-driven facelift to the old standby of bullet time photography. Dredd is an R-rated film because the violence is so aggressive onscreen. Heads explode, limbs go flying, and blood splatters everywhere in crystal clear high definition digital stock. The understated performances by the cast really ground the film in a far more believable and disturbing reality than you might imagine.
Though some of the circumstances are a bit too familiar, Dredd succeeds because of the strength of the comic series. There really is nothing else quite like the brutality of this universe and the entire creative team works together to make the panels come alive. It's unlikely that this attempt at realizing Judge Dredd will lead to a sequel, but at least we finally get a fair adaptation of the clinical Judge who never takes off his helmet.