Death Race Review

Posted by Joseph Lee on 08.24.2008

Car go boom!



Starring:
Jason Statham as Jensen Ames
Tyrese Gibson as Machine Gun Joe
Joan Allen as Hennessey
Ian McShane as Coach
Natalie Martinez as Elizabeth Jayne Case

Story: In the near-future, private organizations are in charge of prisons after the US economy collaspes. The concept of Death Race is born to earn money from viewers wanting to watch criminals kill each other for a chance at freedom. Jensen Ames is a working-class everyman who is framed in the murder of his wife, so he can be sent to the prison to take part in the Death Race. Once he discovers who killed his wife, it becomes a matter of revenge in addition to trying to stay alive and be free.

Fun Trivia: David Carradine lends his voice to the film, playing the original Frankenstein in the beginning of the film.

When the title of "worst director" is brought up, Paul W.S. Anderson's name usually gets thrown around with it. Whether this is deserved or not is up to the mind of the reader, but he has not had many critically acclaimed films. After a four year absence from directing (his last film, Alien vs Predator was in 2004) he returns with a remake to cult fim Death Race 2000, originally produced by Roger Corman. The movie itself has been no stranger to trials and tribulations as it's been in development since 2002 and was originally going to have Tom Cruise and be over at Paramount. As you can tell, this is no longer the case.

When it comes to developing rich stories and complex characters, Anderson can't put a good film together. Previous films like Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil have shown us that Anderson likes to throw as many fights and action sequences as possible without stopping to develop any story or characters. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. With Death Race, he relies on this, giving the movie thrilling car chases with lots of explosions. In that regard, the movie works better than some of his previous films.

A great move was casting Jason Statham in the lead. Statham is becoming the go-to actor for these types of roles lately, after hits like The Transporter and Crank. He manages to provide a solid performance even with everything exploding all around him. Tyrese Gibson is proving himself to be decent himself, especially with roles like this. Joan Allen was a suitable choice for the role of the lead villain. You could tell she had fun being as evil as she possibly could be, and it shows on the screen as she's something of a "love to hate" character.

This movie did suffer from some flaws however. The most glaring of these is the camera work. During the races, it's hard to tell which car is which until a shot of the driver is shown, and there are so many drivers near the beginning it makes this even harder. When people start dying, I had to wait to be told who it was before I knew. This movie falls victim to the same "shaky-cam" style that recent action and horror movies have been relying on. Thankfully it's not all the time, or it would have been difficult to watch. One other minor grievance is that the character of Machine Gun Joe has a little nuance to his character of "is he gay or not" that really wasn't necessary.

The characters didn't have much development, as expected, and the plot wasn't full of holes but conveniences. The ending was very cliched and too Hollywood for my tastes, especially considering the grim nature of the plot. I'm not saying that the ending had to be nihilistic, but the entire thing wraps up a little too neatly. This introduces some very contrived plot devices that show up just when you think they're going to present a problem. I won't give anything away but I did find it very annoying that everything just happened to work out the way it did.

Overall, Death Race plays to its strengths and although flawed, comes out being enjoyable enough if you let it. Jason Statham's star will hopefully continue to rise with the multiple action films he's had this year and we can see him in better quality roles. This will have to do for now.

The 411: Death Race gives Anderson a chance to put emphasis on his positives and less focus on his negatives. It's full of action sequences that are fairly entertaining and Jason Statham manages to hold his own in light of a bad script and not-so-good camera work. For what it is, Death Race ends up being big dumb fun.

Final Score:  6.0   [ Average ]