Friday
22Aug2008
Movie Review - 'Death Race'
Friday, August 22, 2008 at 12:00AM Death RaceStarring Jason Statham, Joan Allen, and Ian McShane
Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
Rated R
There are plenty of reasons to knock
Death Race sight unseen. The director,
Paul W.S. Anderson, is best known for the
first Resident Evil movie and then a string of forgettable flicks
before and since, most of which are also based on video games. The star of
this flick is
Jason Statham, who is best known for
driving fast, wearing a scowl, and kicking ass; we won’t be adding “Sir” to
his name anytime soon. And, at least in spirit, it’s a remake of a pretty
so-so movie called Death Race 2000.
However, when a movie, its stars, and its
director give you exactly what you think they should and the results aren’t
the least bit boring, well, see…that’s actually a success where I come from.
Death Race doesn’t set the bar very
high, but it definitely clears it, mixing hardcore characters, aggressive
driving, and loud explosions with Statham’s passionless monotone and some
good bitchy dialogue from
Joan Allen. That’s right: Joan Allen. It is
what some other movies haven’t been this summer: A fun,
check-your-brain-at-the-door 90 minutes.
Now, because this film barely resembles the
original Roger Corman production, it does no good to compare the two. The
first one was campy and over-the-top, and the new film is much darker. Even
though some of the names are the same, the setting this time around is
Terminal Island, a massive federal prison miles off the coast of somewhere.
The prison is owned by a mega-corporation because some years in the future,
the U.S. economy sinks completely, and when crime rates rise, the only
solution to handle the prison overcrowding is to let big companies bolster
their own bottom lines by working with the government to lock up the bad
guys.
A ball-busting warden at one of these
prisons (Allen) gets the idea to webcast a series of races starring the
inmates at Terminal Island. For $250, you can watch three days of racing and
more importantly, you can watch hardened criminals kill each other. In a lot
of movies, that’s that old device whereby the media points back at its
viewers and implies rather loudly, “Well, you made us put this garbage on.”
To its credit, Death Race never judges its own audience or the
prospective audience of the fictional and fatal Cannonball Run.
During one of his half-dozen or so run-ins
with the warden, all of which are good fun to watch, new inmate Statham is
told that if he replaces the legendary masked Frankenstein in the next race
and wins, he’ll regain his freedom. Naturally, we expect there to be strings
attached to that offer.
Stylistically, there’s nothing special
about this movie. It’s an action flick with lots of mayhem. Some of the
stunts are cool, some are just OK. But by the same token, there’s nothing -
outside of the first appearance of three-time Oscar nominee Joan Allen -
that sticks out like a sore thumb.
I thought Anderson did an admirable job
setting up the background for Statham, introducing the prison system and the
rules of the race in the first 20 – 30 minutes, because the next hour is all
Death Race action, none of which feels as repetitive as it surely must be.
To be sure, there’s more formula here than in Al Pacino’s jet black hair,
and it’s not a script that would work for anything other than a movie called
Death Race, but if you want a pineapple upside-down cake and what you
order tastes like a pineapple upside-down cake, then you can’t really
complain, right?
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