...And Karl Urban makes for a great Dredd. He’s grizzled and terse and unstoppable. This is also down to Alex Garland’s smart and source material-sensitive script. The temptation would be to punctuate key moments of action with witty one-liners and sardonic quips, but he avoids this betrayal of the character. Dredd enforces the law. He’s just doing his job, and doing it well is likely to result in a grimace, not a smug pun. It’s refreshing, and makes the character all the more intimidating.

The decision to leave the helmet on for the entire film works – the character of Dredd is held purposely at a distance from the audience. We see him very much from the perspective of Anderson: a forbidding examiner...

...In many ways, Dredd feels like an action film from a simpler time, like Assault on Precinct 13 or Escape From New York. It doesn’t break the bank with escalating set-pieces, to the point where the character is lost amidst the explosions. Dredd is a character study, primarily, one fuelled by violence and action, and we can’t think of a better way to re-introduce this character to cinema audiences.

Frazzled wrote:do you have a rotten tomatoes link?

Ahtman wrote:

Apparently the film is a very hard R, with a crap load of very graphic violence, ala Robocop.