Death Race Review

Published by Jeff Leins on: August 24th, 2008

As the director of an inexcusable amount of bad video game adaptations and the abysmal Alien vs. Predator, Paul W.S. Anderson has made a career out of taking the original work of more talented people and bastardizing it into reel garbage. He seems to have carved a niche for himself with brainless action trash, so maybe that explains why he’s blissfully unaware of his contributions to unintentional comedy.

Death Race is no different. As an awful remake of the 1975 original Death Race 2000, the goofy satire has been exploded away and replaced with a pseudo-gritty mess of poorly-constructed action sequences and incessant slow motion.

It’s like The Fast and the Furious movies only dumber and the cars have been “pimped out” with impenetrable armor and turret guns. But even gearheads and action junkies may lose interest as yet another car explodes on the circular track to no where. If only they had installed flux capacitors, we might’ve had something worth watching.

The plot presents a future United States penal system where inmates compete in a gladiator-like race to win their freedom. It’s simple. You only have to win five races, each with three stages, and part of the objective is to kill the other drivers. Meanwhile, the spectacle is broadcast on pay-per-view to millions while the warden calls the unfair shots. Ready, set, ugh.

Jason Statham stars as Jensen Ames, a steel factory worker and former race car driver framed for the murder of his wife. He’s sent to Terminal Island, where he’s forced to take the wheel from the recently deceased Frankenstein. Frank was one win away from winning his freedom and the crowd favorite. He even wore a metal hockey mask to make it convenient for Ames to replace him.

But wait, the main character can’t be wearing a metal shield over his face. What actor would agree to that? Don’t worry, you’re dealing with a screenwriting professional. Anderson just wrote in bulletproof mirror glass, so Statham is free to glare menacingly at the dashboard cam.

He’s racing against a field of the “worst of the worst” criminals, including Frankenstein’s nemesis, Machine Gun Joe. Tyrese Gibson brings his 2 Fast 2 Furious experience to the role of Joe, which consists of cutting his pretty boy face for each kill, reciting the “Big Book of Hollywood One-Liners,” and of course constantly firing a machine gun.

Ames is coached along by a sexy passenger seat sidekick (Natalie Martinez) and a wise former inmate cleverly named “Coach” (Ian McShane). Coach is like Morgan Freeman’s character in Shawshank Redemption, only with more driving experience and his own stash of groan-worthy one liners.

But I wanted to save my favorite character until the end. Joan Allen’s prison warden/TV producer is the worst villain in recent memory, a laughable reminder of how inept Anderson is at writing or directing. Her instructions must have been “stand tall and scowl into the camera,” because she does that every time she’s on screen. Anderson could have filmed her once and told her to go home. I wish he hadn’t filmed her at all. The 52-year-old mother and three time Oscar nominee actually delivers the line, “Ok, c*cksucker. F*ck with me and we’ll see who sh*ts on the sidewalk.” What does that even mean? I was openly laughing in my seat, but I doubt you could hear me over the 468th explosion.

Even worse is when she tells him between stages, “You know, even if you win, you could just stay here with me.” What a great idea! Instead of taking his freedom and seeing his daughter again he could stay in prison where he’ll continue driving in an event called “Death Race” for a woman he suspects set him up. This is the kind of conundrum bestowed on the oh-so-complex characters formed in the brilliant mind of Paul W.S. Anderson.

Death Race isn’t more than a brainless B-movie pile of junk that anyone with half a brain can predict before the light turns green. I’m not sure I could say it’s watchable with a straight face.

1 out of 5.