Of the many pleasures to be found in
Dredd, Pete Travis' lean, nasty bottle episode of a film, perhaps the greatest is the lack of cumbersome setup that so dreadfully weighs down many comic book films. The only backstory for the protagonist and the world he inhabits is delivered by the main character himself in a terse voiceover that condense the hour of setting and character establishment that has become
de rigeur for franchise starters to a mere minute or two. The Earth is an irradiated wasteland, and the only inhabitable area in the remnants of the United States is a vast, concrete-walled region known as Mega City One. Keeping the 800 million boxed-in residents of this massive slum in order are a group of peacekeepers known as Judges, authorized to pass and execute judgment on the street. Oh, and one of these Judges is named Dredd.
And that's all she wrote. Cut from this sparest of setups straight into a fracas, Dredd (Karl Urban) chasing down a car full of drug addicts as they fire wildly at the Judge on their trail. Set aside but a few more minutes after this swift action sequence to lay out the film's plot: assigned to take a rookie made psychic by radiation exposure (Olivia Thirlby) on patrol, the two head to a towering slum block to investigate a gang message killing. What they find is a 200-story building entirely under the control of a savage gang leader, Ma-Ma (Lena Headey) looking to protect her manufacturing plant for Mega City One's hottest new drug, Slo-Mo. Literally locking the building down, Ma-Ma forces Dredd and Anderson to fight scores of bad guys tasked with collecting their heads.
