If any comic book franchise needed a reboot it's Judge Dredd. The character's other appearance on the silver screen was a complete wreck with an indecipherable Sylvester Stallone playing the titular Dredd, co-starring with, of all people, Adam Sandler co-hort Rob Schneider. Yup, it's bad. But the silver lining was that now, in 2012, we're seeing the Dredd that should have been, in all it's slick, explosive glory. The plot is basically a less awesome version of The Raid, where Judge Dredd and his psychic partner Anderson (Karl Urban and Olivia Thirlby) are locked inside an apartment complex and fight an onslaught of bad guys for the whole movie.
Whether or not you enjoy this film really comes down to personal taste. There are lots of bullets flying, really breathtaking uses of visual effects, and some nice sprinkles of deadpan humor, but this just wasn't my bag. What you see is what you get with Dredd 3D - there's no real story, subtext, interesting character development - it's just pure carnage for an hour and a half. There were some cool touches, like Dredd's gun and how it could change ammunition types (like in a video game) and the drug that the bad guys would use on their victims before throwing them off of the tower. Actually called 'slow-mo', the inhalent makes your brain functioning decelerate, making the long fall down seem like an eternity. During these scenes the camera slows down thousands of times and what is captured is actually kind of beautiful. But besides its technical achievements, this is not something I'll want to come back to see, especially when The Raid was the same thing but showcased a lot more real physical talent and different moves - Dredd 3D is just "Bullets: The Movie."
Rating: C
Clint Eastwood's late career has been self-typecast as the grumpy old man - a trend I thought would apex at Gran Torino. But no, we have not seen the last of Eastwood's "grump" films; in Trouble with the Curve, Clint is an aging widow with a detached relationship with his daughter (Amy Adams). Living the wonder years, his natural talent of baseball draft-picking is starting to deteriorate with his vision, along with some other body parts (we get a nice sequence of him struggling to urinate right at the beginning of the film). There's really not much to this movie; it's incredibly predictable, there's not much going on that's terribly interesting, and Justin Timberlake is thrown in for no reason other than to have a love interest for Adams. The only thing I enjoyed were the performances by Clint and Adams, who were pretty convincing at playing off each other, but even with strong lead performances this is a chore to sit through. Moneyball did baseball better and Robot and Frank did sad/sweet old man better; Trouble with the Curve is a swing-and-a-miss.
Rating: C-
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