Kelly Wand"Death Race" review
September 5th 2008 22:56
Jason Statham drives hard for the paycheck in "Death Race."
Death Race sucks. I liked it.
Calling it the best movie that Paul W. S. Anderson has yet made is faint praise indeed (he always seems to cut away from the pay-off shots and has no grace with dialogue whatsoever), but where his ball-less, unimaginative Resident Evil movies embarrassingly try so hard to impress, Death Race comes across, appropriately, as a Roger Corman exploitation flick in (more or less) the spirit of the 1975 original starring David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone (both of whom I wish had reprised their roles; I also wish there was still a number in the title and that it was either “3000” or, however anachronistically, “2000”). In the 1975 version, racers scored points for running over pedestrians, bonus if they were handicapped; unsurprisingly, the remake plays it much safer while trumpeting “There are no rules!”
The movie’s really just a string of shots of cars blowing up and smashing into each other while racing around the same dreary, gray, winter-P.M.-lit curves (all of the races appear to be set in and around an abandoned refinery). Although the ancillary (i.e., chaingun-fodder) racers get brief bios, none of them seems especially well-drawn or to stand out much. Tyrese Gibson plays a convict who’s supposedly gay, although the movie and the actor both seem to forget this by the next scene. The nondescript evilest racer kills Jason Statham’s wife and frames him for the crime (apparently they let him out of prison and his racing duties just for that), so Statham can be sent to the penitentiary where the ice-queen warden, Joan Allen, has her prisoners race around a track studded with videogame-style manhole-covers sporting shield and gun glyphs. Depraved people (i.e., the American public) pay stiff rates to watch the three stages of this contest online from what we’re told are “hundreds of camera angles”, none apparently from within the car, since Statham’s supposed to be posing as a dead racer named “Frankenstein” who wears a heavily scorched steel executioner-mask that obscures his peripheral vision.
All of the racers’ cars have chain-guns on them, but also heavy concrete shields on the back called “tombstones” to make the chain-gun-fire less exciting. The inmates also get crazily hot female “navigators”; apparently there are a number of crazily hot female prisoners with navigational experience in this dystopia. Statham’s R2-unit comes in the tortuously voluptuous form of Natalie Martinez, who’s doing time for murdering her cop husband with a knife but since he was cheating on her, it’s okay. She says things like, “Shield coming up,” and “Go right here.” Her swelling (and swell) cleavage would distract a lesser driver but luckily Statham’s wearing that steel mask; or rather, is supposed to be. Towards the end, she admits to Statham that her orders are to kill him just as she betrayed her last driver but she's recanting because, “I owe it to Frankenstein.”
Ian McShane’s sexy rasp is also on hand in prison blues but for some reason he doesn’t get to say “cocksucker”, Joan Allen does (or maybe I dreamed it). Near the end, we find out that he's had the power to blow up the warden in her office all along but didn’t make use of this privilege till now, or maybe not until Statham exposed the system as “corrupt”, or until he could deliver a cliché one-liner directly into the camera, take your pick.
The skilled racers seem to die off far too fast for Joan Allen to turn any kind of long-term profit; she also complicates matters by cheating openly and introducing giant trucks bristling with rockets and crossbows and attitude-adjusters to kill everybody – if it succeeds, then who wins the race? What’s the over-under? What other sports are on? Opportunities for Paul Verhoeven-style ads for other contests don’t come up; humor, let alone wit, doesn’t seem to be Anderson’s thing. Then again, most things aren’t except getting more work and nailing Milla Jovovich (touche!)*.
Still, what it lacks in the sensical, Death Race makes up for in sheer (audio) volume and brutality. The movie feels like a tank sitting on your face firing into your groin for ninety minutes. And while Anderson’s definitely no George Miller, Statham (surprisingly gaunt here) is almost Mel Gibson, if you squint a lot, and especially if you’re starved for imagery of bloody motor oil on celluloid. Apparently I was.
*Any director can do that.
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