Death Race

Christopher Lloyd

August 22, 2008 by Christopher Lloyd | Staff

0 votes

Remake of campy flick fails by taking itself seriously

You've got to hand it to Jason Statham. He has built a legitimate movie career based almost entirely on driving cars and kicking people.

"Death Race" is the natural evolution from those "Transporter" movies, where the bald, brawny Brit made himself an action star by driving expensive cars through walls, occasionally interrupted by some martial arts mayhem.

This is a dopey remake of 1975's campy "Death Race 2000," and the title pretty well sums up the action: Homicidal drivers careen around in souped-up vehicles loaded with weapons, ostensibly to win a race but really to turn their opponents into a pulpy mess while TV audiences enjoy the gruesome spectacle.

Stone-faced and silly

The old flick at least didn't take itself too seriously -- it parodied our thrill-seeking, consumer-oriented society, with the drivers getting extra points for running over pedestrians. But Statham has only one acting mode -- stone-faced and squinty, rasping his lines like he's trying to strangle them -- and the movie follows his grim cue.

Instead of a cross-country race, the action moves to a grimy prison called Terminal Island. The race circles the island, controlled by ratings-obsessed Warden Hennessey (Joan Allen -- an Oscar-caliber actress in a Razzie-caliber movie). She's worried because her star driver, Frankenstein, bought it a while back and her audience has dwindled.

Jensen Ames (Statham), a former racer who's been framed for the murder of his wife, conveniently drops into Hennessey's lap. Drivers go free after they've won five races, and Frankenstein had four. If Ames agrees to pose as Frankenstein, wearing the mask he used to conceal his scarred face, he can get sprung by winning just one race.

Of course, the other drivers also would like a ticket out. They're a sensitively diverse group, including an Asian who drives a rice rocket, an Aryan Nazi and a Hispanic who calls everybody "puto." The biggest threat is Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson, the only actor who seems to realize this movie should be poking fun at itself).

The drivers' navigators, who ride shotgun and work the weapons, are all attractive female prisoners wearing low-cut jeans and half-shirts (standard prison issue, of course). This is supposed to be for the benefit of the audience, but since the girls are unseen behind the cars' mirrored windows and armor, they could just as easily be 300-pound slobs named Lenny.

Shaken, not stirring

The other significant player is Coach (Ian McShane), the head mechanic who rebuilds Frankenstein's Mustang after each crunch-inducing stage of the race.

The race scenes are reasonably exciting, but director Paul W. S. Anderson evidently thinks that shaking the camera like a bobblehead makes things more "intense." One bit in which the drivers face off with a decked-out tractor-trailer is like the big chase in "The Road Warrior," but in reverse.

The dialogue is laughably bad, when it even makes sense. Hennessey: "Mess with me and we'll see who (poops) on the sidewalk." I have no idea what this means, but Anderson likes it so much he repeats it at the end of the closing credits. It's a fitting checkered flag for this dim-witted retread.

Death Race

Rating: One and a half stars (out of four)

Cast: Jason Statham, Joan Allen, Ian McShane, Tyrese Gibson, Natalie Martinez.

Running time: 105 minutes.

Rated: R; violence and language.

Posted in groups: Movies

Forum: Movies

Tags: 

action, Joan Allen, Jason Statham, Tyrese Gibson, Ian McShane, Natalie Martinez

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2 comments

joe.shearer
joe.shearer, August 22
0 votes

"I was scratching my head at the (poops) on the sidewalk" line too. I was wondering what that meant. It was almost like "Mess with me, and..." was the last line on the script's page, but Joan Allen's script was missing that next page, so she just picked up what was next. It made NO sense.

Christopher Lloyd
Christopher Lloyd, August 25
0 votes

My main problem with the movie is that it seemed to want to parody itself, but everybody except Tyrese kept playing it straight.

By the way, the quote above is the cleaned-up version of that strange line...

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