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Enter Jason Statham as Jensen Ames, on a murder rap (rocking the Harrison Ford, I didn’t kill my wife, Fugitive vibe), and Joan Allen as Warden Hennessey, a women with the hardest ass and the thinnest lips EVAR, who just happens to need a new Frankenstein. Any subtlety of that character name is shot to shit when Ames leans in close to Hennessey, after she’s pulled yet another dick move against him, and intones (in his dreamy accent) “You wanted a monster…well, now you’ve got one.” She needs him to keep the ratings up when the real Frankenstein (voiced-over by DR2000’s Frankenstein, David Carradine, in a nice bit of synchronicity) punches his ticket in a race, and he needs to trust her to let him go when he has won so he can rescue his infant daughter from a hellish foster home life. Add to that the various psychopaths with car keys, including Tyrese Gibson taking over from Sly Stallone as Machine Gun Joe, here a gangsta instead of a wannabe 30’s gangster, and like a scrotum, you have Death Race in a nutshell.  | Like David Byrne, you may ask yourself, is this enough in a movie? The short answer is, basically, yeah. There are exploding cars and exploding heads, plenty of high-speed chasing and Gatlin gun firing (what I consider to be an inordinate amount of attention was paid to seeing the spent shells hit the ground), and one particularly brutal bisection by auger. And then of course there is the Latin cheesecake provided by Natalie Martinez as Ames’s navigator, Case. But the change of setting from a cross-country race to the prison setting saps any possible tension from the film. Gone is the concept of gaining points by running over innocent pedestrians, and every single racer other than Ames is a murderous miscreant misfit from society. You won’t give a duck fart if any of them die, and you know Ames won’t, because Statham is top billed. |
The first of the two other issues I have is the cinematography. There are no primary colors anywhere in the film (well, a little at the end, but it hardly matters then) and the color in the film was almost completely desaturated. I understand they were going for a gritty, Dystopian, less-than-five-years in the future thing, but when you take away most of what my visual center cues on, I’m only firing on seven cylinders while watching the movie. Oldboy is a great example of a moderate usage of the bleach bypass process. Just enough to tweak the colors, to give the film a distinctive feel, but not enough to render the whole affair drab. Kind of like when a metal band detunes the guitars so low that they lose all tonality, and become merely percussive instruments. Sure, it can be a neat sound, but not for an entire 70 minutes.
| The second issue is with the vehicles themselves. Due to the new conceit of being racecars modified in a prison auto shop, the cars are menacing in appearance, but also very utilitarian. They completely lack the personality and humor of the cars in the source material, and a great fountain of camp is cut off before it can spout. In fact, camp is eschewed altogether. Some feeble attempt is made with the camera sweeps and crash zooms on Joan Allen, but they end up feeling more like video game direction than anything else. Which I guess is what it really boils down to: Death Race is a live-action video game. And like a video game, it is enjoyable for what it is. Thinner than puff pastry, but filled with enough red good and spices that you probably won’t notice. |  |
* By free, I mean I had earned a free ticket with my Regal Crown Club Card, and by private I mean it was a matinee and no one else was in the theater. The devil is in the details, yo.
Check out Mr Majestyk's take on Death Race
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