Paul W.S. Anderson doesn’t know how to separate himself from video games. It’s quite obvious that he doesn’t have an interest in anything other than video game movies anymore, and this initiative of his is transparent even in non-video game adaptations like this one. The original Death Race 2000 did have elements in it that resemble the modern day video game, and indeed it inspired such games as Carmageddon, but Anderson made the connection even more prevalent. In his version of the Death Race, the cars have to drive over certain plates on the track to activate their weapons, similar to how one would collect power-ups in a video game. I had my suspicions when I first saw the trailer, and after seeing the movie it was confirmed: this is Paul W.S. Anderson’s Twisted Metal movie. It's as if he wrote an adaptation of that game, was denied the rights, then decided to scoop up Roger Corman’s classic instead and swapped the character names.
Jason Statham plays Jensen Ames, one of many blue collars laid off in a bleak future where the U.S. economy has collapsed and America’s favorite past time is a live web show of convicts killing each other with cars. Strangely, we’re supposed to believe that in a future where minimum wage is a joke and poverty is rampant (and Pabst Blue Ribbon is considered a fancy drink—Ho ho ho!), millions and millions of these poor jobless homeless bastards would actually spend hundreds of dollar to subscribe to what is essentially NASCAR with skeet shooting. There’s your economic crisis right there! Remember, kids, when you mix consumerism with redneck hobbies, you get a clichéd dystopian world. Ames is framed with his own wife’s murder and goes to prison, where the manipulative warden Hennessey (Joan Allen) forces him to replace the late fan-favorite masked driver Frankenstein. If Ames wins, he goes free. Helping the new Frankenstein reach this goal is a pit crew led by the veteran Coach (played with great apathy by Ian McShane), who also guides Ames through prison life.
Death Race is appropriately low on plot and heavy on racing, which would be fine if it made up for the thin story in other departments. The vista of the film is repetitiously dull, since the race just laps around an industrial island, of which every corner look identical to the last. Not to mention the headache-inducing pulsating camera zooms meant to simulate “intense” driving. The dialogue, in keeping with the video game inspiration, reads like a transcript of an XBox Live session, ranging from “What’s my name, bitch? 14k, that’s my name!” to “That shit don’t work twice, playboy!” On the track, it’s little more than a gorier Fast and the Furious (also with an idiot savant on the crew). Off the track, it’s little more than a tamer Oz, if Oz was silly enough to portray the boss of every ethnic-specific gang in prison as racers. Equal opportunity butchery, I guess.
Watching Death Race, I found myself nostalgic for the rules in Death Race 2000, which gave drivers points for the type of innocent pedestrians they run over. I missed these civilian deaths not out of a perverse hate for humanity, but for the laughs. The original was campy satire that wasn’t afraid to go all out with its black humor to say something. By making his version a serious and gritty action movie, Anderson sapped all the fun out of the premise and made it a snoozefest. For a good half of it, all we see is a bunch of indistinguishable cars shooting at each other’s armor, until one flips in the air whilst on fire. Whee. The number of times we see flaming flying cars is actually pretty funny, but that’s what this movie is passing as “action.”
With Corman’s original, the race is portrayed as something completely absurd and demented; but in Death Race, despite characters pointing it out as this evil sport, it’s clearly the film’s main tool of trade with its depiction of cool mayhem. It’s endorsing a real Death Race whist afraid of the guilt of actual deaths, kinda like the people who make phony snuff porn. There’s one moment in the movie that’s unintentionally brimming with delicious irony: a character reflects that all there is to the Death Race is violence and pretty girls, paraded only to grab ratings. He says this with disdain—as if it’s some profound social commentary—which is particularly hilarious because the very next second, the soundtrack blasts a sexy R&B beat and we get uber-cheesecake slow motion shots of “hot bitches” descending onto the racing track. Is that hypocrisy or ignorance? I don’t even want to know.
"Death Race" opens August 22, 2008 and is rated R. Action, Sci-Fi. Directed by Paul WS Anderson. Written by Paul W.S. Anderson. Starring Ian McShane, Jason Statham, Joan Allen, Tyrese Gibson.
