Dredd (Pete Travis, 2012)

Excessive credit has been lavished by comic-book purists on this reworking of Judge Dredd for the simple reason that it doesn't try to humanise the anti-hero, go for laughs or get him to take his helmet off even once, unlike its throwaway 1995 Stallone precursor. This would lead one to suppose it is a better film for that. It is not: the grunting robot-like Dredd persona is an uninteresting one when left untouched in translation to screen and the best aspect of the comic, namely the gallows parody of a world that is a nightmare distortion of our own, is mostly left unexplored, while the film trudges on like Dredd through a buildingful of cannon-fodder baddies, filling them with bullets on the way. It's like The Raid with inferior choreography and no more wit, whereas it should have at least been satirical.

4/10