Dir. Paul W.S. Anderson, 2008, US, 105mins
Cast: Jason Statham, Joan Allen, Ian McShane
Review by Matthew Rodgers
The era of the hard-bodied action hero, brawn rather than brains, has been on the wane since Arnie preferred to become “the governator” instead of sporting bullet-bouncing biceps. Jason Statham remains the last in that mould, The Last Action Hero if you like? That is not to the detriment of his obvious charm as an actor, he is certainly more capable with the dialogue than the “Austrian Oak”, and it’s his convincing enthusiasm that gets this remake/re-imagining of Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000 out of the blocks and worth strapping in for. Just.
Seemingly moulded in the same workshop as similar spare parts movie, Gone in Sixty Seconds, Death Race is all flash edits and a reverberating soundtrack of metal music and grinding gears. The races are the main attraction, much like a suped-up version of Robot Wars the cars are ramshackle and ugly, but their impending carnage is pure Boy’s Own entertainment. And therein lies the problem, Death Race has a very niche target audience, those who like UFC and Slipknot, so for that reason a plot has been mounted onto the hood of the film’s threadbare mechanics.
Statham is Jenson Ames, a former NASCAR champion and family man struggling to make ends meet in a future dystopia that makes this week’s credit crisis seem trivial. A bad day gets worse when shortly after losing his job at the steel mill he returns home only to have his wife butchered to death and find himself framed for the murder. Sent to Terminal Island (seriously?) prison he must compete in a series of to-the-death races under the tyrannical hand of Warden Hennessey (a slumming it, Joan Allen) in order to win his release. There’s no tunnel behind a Raquel Welch poster here.
For all of his shortcomings, and there are a lot, Paul W.S. Anderson at least has a knack for creating convincing futurescapes, from Resident Evil to the ghostly halls of Event Horizon, a film that he has never bettered due to the subtlety lacking in some terrible, terrible efforts since. Here his environment is ripped straight from The Running Man, but it is effective in not shifting the canvas beyond the believable; this is a grey, grimy, consumer-driven landscape, which could easily be around the next corner.
Death Race manages to splutter over the finishing line thanks to Statham’s charisma and some “neat explosions, man”, but the appeal to adrenaline addicts aside, this B-Movie actioner is predictably brainless.
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