Years before he made The Boys, Karl Urban starred in a different blood-soaked superhero adaptation — 2012’s Dredd — and it’s an underrated gem that deserves to finally get a sequel. When The Boys premiered in 2019, Urban quickly became royalty within the comic book fandom for his delightfully foul-mouthed, devil-may-care portrayal of supe-slaying vigilante Billy Butcher. He’s also known for playing Éomer in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Bones McCoy in the Star Trek reboot series, but Butcher has quickly become his most renowned role.
But Butcher wasn’t the first sociopathic, murderous comic book character that Urban played on-screen. In 2012, he inherited the role of Judge Dredd from Sylvester Stallone. Stallone’s Judge Dredd movie was panned for being a lighthearted buddy comedy with toothless PG-13 violence, which was completely unbefitting of the iconic 2000 A.D. character. Dredd restored the source material’s gratuitous gore and searing social commentary — and Urban’s stoic gruffness perfectly captured what this law-abiding antihero is supposed to represent.
Karl Urban’s Dredd Is Everything A Comic Book Movie Should Be
Dredd Is A Fun, Bloody Spectacle With A Point
Dredd does everything a great comic book adaptation should: it’s a fun, bloody spectacle with a lot to say about the dangers of authoritarianism and a police state. Dredd is essentially a futuristic version of The Raid, in which Judge Dredd infiltrates a high-rise controlled by a ruthless drug lord. When the building is locked down and all the drug lord’s goons come after him, Dredd has to shoot his way out of there. The simplicity of its plot allowed screenwriter Alex Garland to focus on rounding out the character of Dredd himself and his complicated, sometimes contradictory ideology.
The simplicity of its plot allowed screenwriter Alex Garland to focus on rounding out the character of Dredd himself and his complicated, sometimes contradictory ideology.
Garland captures Dredd’s character through his relationship with Judge Anderson, a young rookie he’s mentoring on her training day, in a dynamic reminiscent of the Dirty Harry movie The Enforcer. If Dredd has one fault, it’s that it lacks the absurdist satire of the comics. But the case could be made that its faithful portrayal of Mega-City One as a sprawling dystopian metropolis governed by a gun-toting police force with absolute power is inherently satirical in and of itself.
Why Dredd Never Got A Sequel (When Everybody Seems To Love It)
Dredd’s Underwhelming Marketing Campaign Led To Box Office Disappointment
Although it seems to be universally loved and it only just scratched the surface of Mega-City One, Dredd never got a sequel. From Judge Anderson’s career to Dredd’s relationship with the Chief Judge, there are a lot of interesting threads from the first movie that could be picked up in a sequel. Unfortunately, after the studio mishandled the film’s marketing campaign, Dredd was a box office bomb, so a sequel was never really viable.
