Death Race (2008) Film Rating and Review :
Rating :
Acting – 6/10
Direction – 5/10
Screenplay – 4/10
Music – 4/10
Technique – 6/10
Review :
Bonehead fare, but effective
Death Race is made by Paul Anderson, a man whose filmography — Shopping, Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, Alien vs Predator — has probably a lower collective IQ level than that of any other director. And yet Anderson’s remake of the 1975 Paul Bartel cult film Death Race 2000 is surprisingly effective bonehead fare.
It’s the kind of coarse, high-tar grindhouse flick that Quentin Tarantino was celebrating and trying to mimic in Death Proof. The film claims to be set in 2012, although it looks like only a slightly exaggerated version of America in 2008. The nation’s economy is collapsing, the police routinely bash up protesters, and corporations have taken over the prison system.
One particular jail, located in Terminal Island, is ruled by a sexily severe governor called Hennessey (Joan Allen), who stages auto-races in which prisoner-drivers are encouraged to crash into and shoot at rival cars.
The bloody mayhem that ensues is filmed and sold as borderline snuff movies to pay-per-view subscribers.
Ratings are in decline, though. To boost them, Hennessey arranges for a hitman to set up Jensen Ames (Jason Statham), an ex-con and former racing champ who’s been trying to get his life on the straight and narrow. Locked up for killing his wife, a crime we know he didn’t commit, he’s told he’ll regain his freedom if he’s willing to impersonate Frankenstein, a masked and very popular driver who died in a recent crash, and go on to win the latest race.
It’s a con, of course, one that he, vying against Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson), sees through and hopes to expose.
The film, smeared in greasy blacks and greys, alternates between savage fights within the prison complex and savage assaults on the race track.
Limbs are lost, heads bludgeoned by metal, bodies torched — all to a soundtrack of hip-hop-inflected industrial grind.
In spite of the welcome appearance of Ian McShane as Ames’s team-mechanic, and the chance to hear Allen deliver some frightfully rude language whenever she’s really miffed, the real charm of the film lies in Statham’s performance.
He comes across as the real deal. You sense that in his time he’s pulled pints, worked on a building site. He has the same gentle, almost rueful quality as the burly crooks found in French B-movies from the 1950s.
His rugged grace under fire is the real reason to go see this grimly successful hunk of pulp.
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