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Movie Review: Death Race
'Death Race' tight storyline packed with action
By John Wirt
jwirt@theadvocate.com
Advocate movie critic
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out of 4 stars.
Death Race, a gritty remake of Roger Corman’s 1975 cult fave, Death Race 2000, is grand entertainment. The new Death Race mixes the rise of reality TV with the original film’s violence-craving locale, a society of the future in which auto races to the death are a national sport.
British writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson specializes in sci-fi action. He previously helmed the Milla Jovovich-starring Resident Evil movies, 2004’s surprisingly good AVP: Alien vs. Predator and the not-so-good, murky space-travel fable, Event Horizon.
Death Race, a lean, mean movie machine, also contains enough story and character development to hold an audience’s attention even when the cameras turn away from the blood-splattered Death Race track. It’s Anderson’s best film.
A prelude to the action explains that in the year 2012 the economy has gone belly up. Millions of people forget their sorrows via the distraction of Death Race Webcasts that originate at Terminal Island Penitentiary. The racing convicts are modern-day gladiators for declining, falling western civilization.
The film casts top-gear actors as its leads. Britain’s Jason Statham (The Transporter, The Bank Job, Snatch) injects his character with enriched intensity. A loving husband and father, Statham’s Jensen Ames gets framed and sentenced to the grim, privately operated, for-profit Terminal Island.
Ames is a welcome addition to the prison population. Boss lady Warden Hennessey covets skilled drivers, the better to boost Death Race ratings.
The imperious Joan Allen fills the warden’s high heels with a greedy, hypocritical chill. Enron aside, she’s the ultimate big-corporation villain, a murderous manipulator who quietly delights in bending and breaking the rules.
After Warden Hennessey makes Ames an offer he can’t refuse, he agrees to drive in the next Death Race. Inmate drivers pilot cars armed with mounted guns, flamethrowers, napalm, oil, smoke. Sexy female convicts bused from a women’s prison ride shotgun. Ames gets a sultry Latina played by Miami native Natalie Martinez. She watches his back, or at least that’s the role she’s playing.
Ames battles a colorful crew of miscreants on and off the track. The vicious and gay Machine Gun Joe, played by actor and rhythm-and-blues singer Tyrese Gibson, is his most talented and dangerous competition. But Ames’ prime nemesis — accurately described by one seasoned inmate as the baddest backside in the prison yard — is always Warden Hennessey. Stratham and Allen, sharing just a few scenes together, definitely draw their lines in the sand.
Running an economical hour and 45 minutes, Death Race is all muscle, no fat. Anderson and his exceptional cast tell their tightly built story and get out of the way.
