Watch An Early Review Of 'Dredd'

Currently settling in with the overseas crowd, this early review of the graphic novel adaptation "Dredd" praises the creativity a smaller scale forced filmmakers to muster forth.

Matthew Buck of ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com is a native of Swindon, England and produced this thorough take on the Karl Urban-starring second go at the comic series, noting a slight personal bias against it but enjoying it overall. Buck takes care to note that the futuristic plot - Dredd (Urban) and his rookie sidekick locked down inside a Mega City One housing project occupied by drug dealer Mama (Lena Headey) and her gang they've come to take down - merits unavoidable comparisons to that of Indonesia's "The Raid: Redemption," which he saw when it was released earlier this year.

Specifically, he points out that "Dredd" was actually completed first and on a tighter budget, but with more post-production addition of computer-rendered effects holding back its release date. "The Raid" was shot much more practically by volume, enabling it to be cranked out and into theaters more expeditiously.

An admitted "bias" for "The Raid" aside, Buck takes care to admire "Dredd" for the creativity and emphasis on character, story development and performance over a digital-effects gloss, an approach he acknowledges is a product of being practically a low-budget independent project by Hollywood-action standards. Hell, he points out, even "The Raid" couldn't exactly claim dibs on the premise, because many an action drama (particularly "Die Hard") did it pretty damn well years before either.

Most importantly, it steps as far as possible from Sylvester Stallone's bombastic, campy, super-budget 1995 "Judge Dredd" and holds truer to the long-running British comic's grim, heavy-hitting tone.

"This is almost the complete antithesis of what that movie was like," Buck explains. "You think of the Stallone movie and you think of a typical big-budget Hollywood blockbuster that didn't really get the source material. It tried to play it to the lowest common denominator, really make it mainstream. This one is darker, meaner, grittier, more violent ... I'm not sure it's going to get quite the mainstream success of the previous one.

"But this one has been made by people who really get the Judge Dredd character, they really love the character, and you can just see that passion all up there on the screen," he adds.

"Dredd" hits U.S. theaters everywhere in conventional and 3-D formats Sept. 21. For more, check out the complete 11-minute review from Buck's "Projector" series, available on Blip.TV/Film-Brain/Projector and at ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com.