Review: Death Race

Death Race

Opening Date: 08/22/2008

STUDIO: Universal

TRAILER: Trailer

ACCOMPLICES: Official Site

The Charge
Get ready for a killer ride.

Opening Statement
It finally happened. Instead of waiting for a video game to be made so Hollywood could adapt it into a bad movie, Hollywood got impatient and made it itself. The results are predictably generic: explosions, bullets, dismemberments, scantily-clad girls and insane car crashes. So what exactly is the problem with that?

Facts of the Case
In the near future, the United States economy has collapsed. Unemployment is rampant, and society is holding on by the barest of threads. Private corporations now run all prisons in America for profit, and Terminal Island Prison has found great success in hosting Death Race, an internet-broadcast cage match between convicted inmates racing heavily-armored and weapon-toting vehicles throughout the prison grounds. The last man standing wins their freedom. The most successful and profitable racer for the prison, the masked Frankenstein recently suffered a large crash at the hands of his rival, Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson), and the ratings have been dropping steadily in his absence.

Jensen Ames (Jason Statham) has just finished working his last shift at a steel factory that has declared bankruptcy. Pocking his final measly wages, he returns home to his wife and newborn baby. A former race car driver, Ames’ career derailed due to his naturally criminal tendencies, but he is happy and content in the arms of his wife, who has him on the straight and narrow path. As he goes upstairs to check on his baby, a masked intruder enters the house and murders his wife. Ames is knocked unconscious and awakes with the bloody knife in his hand.

Framed for the murder of his wife, Ames is sentenced to Terminal Island, where he immediately attracts the attention of the icy warden, Hennessey (Joan Allen), who has read his file and wishes to recruit Ames to drive in Death Race. Ames initially refuses, but is unable to resist the lure of potential freedom, should he win. To his surprise, he is handed the Frankenstein mask. Unknown to the public, the last driver was killed inches from the finish line, and fans are still anxiously awaiting the much-lauded return of their favorite driver. A man in a mask can be replaced, and Hennessey is anxious to have her ratings star return to the track.

A prisoner only needs to win five races to earn their freedom, and the previous Frankenstein has won four races. Ames only needs to win one, and he is assured of an early release. But as Ames slowly gets his bearings in the deadly arena, he soon realizes the warden has no interest in allowing her successful driver to escape the Death Race. Worse, he begins to suspect that his presence in the prison—arriving shortly after the famous Frankenstein is killed in action—may not be a coincidence…

The Evidence
A brain-dead visceral modernization of a schlocky exploitation film, Death Race is empty, hollow, and embarrassingly entertaining. Death Race resembles less a film and more a large, live-action trailer for an upcoming video game; entirely artificial, mindless and ruthlessly fun. Cars chase each other through a desolate industrial warehouse environment, mounted with rockets and machine guns and oil slickers. They knock each other into rails, trigger glowing panels on the ground that “activate” their weaponry, and the last one surviving wins the Death Race. Unless you keep your druthers about you, you might find your hands unconsciously gripping your popcorn bucket, steering the cars left and right out of pure video game reflex.

Death Race has the complexity of a land mine. You step into the theater, some gentle pressure is applied, and within thirty seconds things are blowing up everywhere. Legs go flying. The sheer exploitative quality of it is frighteningly direct—almost pleasantly so. Franky, it’s nice to know where you stand with a movie. At no point does the film even attempt to engage your brain; this is a film of visceral gut reactions, of blood thirst and car chases and revenge and calamity. These are all autonomous reactions, like working your heart and lungs, requiring no activity from your mind in any way, shape or form. You simply sit back and watch things hit the fan

It is difficult to critique a film this straightforward and unforgiving honest. You can’t really fault Death Race for failing to engage the brain of its audiences any more than you could critique it for not having any musical numbers. For what it is, and for what it aims to do—create a gigantic, ninety-minute live-action video game—it does it quickly, effectively and entertainingly. The film opens with bullets flying, and it never stops until the credits roll. Any character and plot development is handled during the opening credit sequence, leaving the rest of the film unrestrained by such constricts. Within ten minutes, Ames has been introduced, framed for murder and tossed into jail, where he inherits the mantle of Frankenstein. No time for love, Doctor Jones!

The plot, such it as is, works in the most rudimentary of senses. Despite the inherent lunacy of the overall concept, the film obeys its own rules and carves out a nice, simple story: man gets framed for murder, man goes to prison, man gets blackmailed into Death Race, man races and destroys everyone in his path. Nice, easy and predictable. Most of the action sequences exhibit that nauseating shaky camera style that is so popular these days, but the sheer scope of some of the crash sequences are fist-pumpingly bodacious. The performances from the cast are entirely one-note, because they only have the one note to play, like a timpani player in an orchestra. They just bang and bang and bang on that drum. Statham can play this brainless action hero role in his sleep. The villain, played by Allen is so painfully nasty and bad, so over-the-top in her bitchiness that it leaves her ultimate comeuppance immensity satisfying. Her presence here is the biggest mystery of the film. On the one hand, what the hell was she thinking? On the other hand, as the audience, we are awfully glad she thought it, because she’s the only thing that even comes close to a satisfying dramatic performance here.

The biggest complaint that fans of the original Corman production will have with Death Race is that it lacks the dystopic humor of its seventies predecessor. Gone is the fascist America where television audiences hungered for pedestrian fatalities—instead, we have an internet webcast of convicted felons blowing each other up. Death Race is an entirely one-note affair and is totally bereft of the satisfying campy humor that made its predecessor such a rousing cult classic of exploitation cinema. In fact, the film bares little resemblance to its forbearer, save for the vaguest of concepts involving heavily armored and weaponized vehicles blowing each other up, and David Carradine, who contributes a voice-over cameo as the original Frankenstein in a nerdy nod to the original.

It is especially amusing to dissect the thin, skeletal plot to Death Race looking for some depth or satire. The film is so straightforward and action film-ish that there is almost no mental substance to be found anywhere. If there is any subtlety here to be had, it probably got run over by gigantic machine-gun-toting Mustang cars. The original film envisioned a fascist America where television audiences yearned for blood and carnage, but in the futuristic state of Death Race, set an embarrassing four years in the future, apparently audiences want a real-life video game. Stupid, to be sure, but consider it for a moment. After all, director Paul W.S. Anderson makes his living adapting video games into live action films, essentially bringing real-life video games to the big screen where audiences flood the studio coffers with endless streams of cash. Maybe there’s something to Death Race after all…

No, I changed my mind. There’s nothing here. Sorry. It was worth a try.

Closing Statement
Death Race sets the bar low and hurtles over it with ease. Cars crash, bullets fly, bodies splatter with reckless abandon; all exactly what the trailer promised. An Oscar winner it isn’t, but few films deliver exactly what they promise, and that counts for something. It might be a dumb video game-turned-action film, but Death Race may be the most straightforward and upfront film this summer. Plus, it’s one hell of a video game teaser trailer.

The Verdict
This one can probably wait for the video store, but darned if it wasn’t a fun way to kill ninety minutes.

6/10

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