"Don't fuck with the Ma-Ma Clan." note
Dredd surpassed its 1995 predecessor in every way imaginable - especially when it comes to scare factor.
- Ma-Ma's gang catches three rogue dealers on their turf and decides to make an example of them. Ma-Ma orders them skinned alive and thrown from the top floor of the building's atrium 200 floors up. Ma-Ma's Lieutenant, Kay, suggests they be dosed with the drug Slo-Mo before throwing them off. The drug artificially prolongs the suffering during their fall to the bottom floor, by altering their perception of time to a fraction of what they would normally experience. The sickening wet splatters as their mutilated corpses hit the ground, and the terrified reactions of the onlookers below — including a woman with a pushchair who narrowly avoids being hit by the first body — do nothing to help.
- The Clan Techie getting his eyes gouged out by Ma-Ma. You only see it briefly, but she personally gouges his eyes out with her thumbs without any medical aide or anaesthetic while he is forcefully held down by some of her goons. His high-pitched wails are skin-crawling and his cybernetic prosthetic replacements after the fact appear red-rimmed and sore, suggesting it wasn't that long ago. Any time she's near him, it's clear that he's terrified out of his mind.
- Dredd's very first execution involves him firing a "Hot Shot" flare into the open mouth of a criminal holding a woman hostage. The man's face and head are brightly lit in a reddish hue as the flare quickly burns him to death from inside his mouth and face and then his head. He collapses slowly to the floor with his face partially charred and a puff of smoke gushing from the back of his head.
- The time it takes for the food court to recover from the shooting? Thirty minutes. A floor-sweeper casually pushes aside a dead Fattie — yes, that is what they are actually called — as it mops up blood. The bodies are collected in a bin for resyk like they were dirty laundry.
- The page image is taken from Ma-Ma's backstory, where she had just castrated Lester, her abusive pimp, with her teeth. The prequel comic steps it up a notch, where she gets him to take a dose of Slo-Mo first, dragging out the pain from his perspective,
◊ and his body is later found dumped on an abandoned building site by the Judges, after he's completely bled to death. Not that the bastard didn't deserve it after he tortured and murdered her boyfriend, but it's still a horrifying thing to think about.Madeline: I'm sorry, you're right. (offers him the Slo-Mo) Try this. It'll... enhance the experience.Lester: Dope?Madeline: And then some. It'll make it last forever.Lester: Cool. (does himself up on the Slo-Mo as he unzips his pants) Glad you've finally accepted who's in charge, Madrigal. - Ma-Ma brings out the big guns on Dredd. And literally, in the form of three enormous rotary cannons with anti-aircraft rounds. Dredd makes it out alive, but dozens to hundreds of citizens, including those with families, do not; and it especially says a lot when even he's unnerved by what he's seeing.
- This exchange:Kay: Like what am I thinking about right now? (imagines himself having rough sex with Anderson.)
Anderson: You're picturing a violent sexual liaison between the two of us in a pointless attempt to shock me.
Kay: You're good. But I wasn't trying to shock you. If I was trying to shock, I'd be thinking about this... (imagines himself doing... something involving heavy breathing)
Anderson: (slaps Kay against the wall) What are you thinking about now, huh? - Just to bring home just how much of a monster Ma-Ma is, she has no qualms against infanticide - including the use of Child Soldiers.Child Soldier: (crying) Why did it have to be us who found him first?
- Anderson's Mind Rape of Kay, full stop. She lures him into a state of false confidence by letting him use his gun on her (he misses at point-blank range), before undressing and going down on him... only to morph into Ma-Ma, who emasculates him instead. All of this happens inside his head. Kay is so utterly terrified that he pisses himself.Anderson: We haven’t even started.
- Kay tries to execute Anderson with her own Lawgiver. When he pulls the trigger, the gun does not recognize the user's DNA. Boom.Kay: Any last words, bitch?
Anderson: Funny, I was going to ask you the same thing. Bitch. - Judge Lex sums up the setting very well:Judge Lex: You know what Mega City One is, Dredd? It's a fucking meat grinder. People go in one end, meat comes out the other... and all we do is turn the handle.
- Mega City One's status as a Wretched Hive has never been better portrayed. Citizens react to vehicular shootouts like it's no big deal, public shootings are treated like technical difficulties that just need to be cleaned up — terrified citizens are told where to find other restaurants after a massacre at a food court — and the film's entire premise is referred to as just another "drug bust", showing the sheer scale of crime facing the Judges each day.Dredd: Perps were... uncooperative.
- Early on, it's established that there's so many crimes in Mega-City One that the Judges can only respond to 6% of them. Even though Sinister Surveillance is the norm.
- Taken from the Ma-Ma clan's perspective, the entire film is one long Mook Horror Show. One of your guys gets busted by a cop, so you send someone after him. He kills them all. You bust out .50 Calibre gatling guns that wipe out an entire floor to no effect? Congratulations, you've made him suspicious - and angry. Send your chief enforcer after him? He throws him off the balcony. Manage to kidnap his partner? Congratulations, you've just made him furious enough to literally rain fire down on more of your Mooks using White Phosphorus rounds - and said kidnapped partner slaughters your lieutenant while escaping, anyway. Send a bunch of Dirty Cops after him? Well done, you've given him more ammo. Threatening to blow up the entire block should work, right? Nope, he just shoots you in the stomach and throws you out a 200-storey window instead. Can also be seen as darkly humorous, given how Dredd just casually shrugs off each escalating obstacle - obstacles that would easily flatten any normal person.Kay: How the fuck are we gonna stop this guy?
- While the film itself is scary on its own, the real-life subtext of the plot gives it a whole new level of terrifying. With the increased scrutiny and concerns regarding mass surveillance, gun control, police brutality and militarization in recent years, many Dredd fans are concerned that the film may have been ahead of its time in all the wrong ways.
Defense noted.
