Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
8/24/08
About
a year and a half ago, I stood more or less alone in my fanatical love
of The Condemned, a slam-bang B movie that
cast wrestler Steve Austin as a wrongfully imprisoned soldier trapped on
an island as a contestant on a reality TV show where he and his fellow
prisoners were forced to fight to the death. It never looked better
to me than it does now that I've seen Death Race, which plays like
a Master's Thesis on how to screw the same story up. Action star
Jason Statham plays a wrongfully imprisoned ex-con trapped in an island
prison as a contestant on a reality TV show where he and his fellow prisoners
are forced to race to the death in souped-up killing machine cars.
It's got a far more accomplished cast and production values that put the
direct-to-video-looking Condemned to shame,
but it's wrongheaded at almost every turn and suffers from one of the most
fundamentally dumb screenplays I've seen filmed in quite some time.
Action hack Paul W.S. Anderson (Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon,
Alien vs. Predator) has made many more competently entertaining
flicks than his status as online whipping boy would suggest, but Death
Race is one of those movies that keeps you asking “what were they thinking?”
until you realize they weren't.
A nifty
opening crawl informs us that in 2012, the US economy collapsed, leading
to exploding crime and the privatization of the prison system. Looking
for ways to turn a profit, Terminal Island began broadcasting cage fights
to Pay-Per-View audiences. Once that became old hat, they moved on
to Death Race, a PPV auto race in which heavily armed cars on a closed
track fight it out. Anyone winning five races gets their freedom,
but not all of the contestants survive. All this is of little concern
to Jensen Ames (Jason Statham), a steel worker whose plant has just closed.
He comes home to his wife (Janaya Stephens) and daughter, only to be knocked
out and awaken surrounded by police next to her dead body. Sentenced
to life in prison, a place to which he's no stranger, Ames is brought before
Warden Hennessey (Joan Allen). Death Race is her baby, but she's
got a problem: fan favorite driver Frankenstein has been killed in
an accident that's been passed off as an injury, and ratings are down 50
percent. Hennessey needs a new Frankenstein, and offers former professional
driver Ames the chance to race in place of the masked champion, needing
just one victory to claim his freedom. He's suspicious to be so totally
in the right place at the right time, but agrees and meets his team:
Coach (Ian McShane) leads a pit crew that also includes Gunner (Jacob Vargas)
and Lists (Frederick Koehler). Attractive female navigators are brought
in from “upstate” and his is Case (Natalie Martinez), who played a mysterious
role in Frankenstein's death. His opponents are led by Frankenstein's
arch nemesis Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson), a sadist who plows through
(male) navigators one after another and cuts his face once for each victim
he kills on the track. But Ames zeroes in on Pachenko (Max Ryan),
who reminds him an awful lot of the fleeting glimpse he got of his wife's
murderer. As he unravels the conspiracy behind her death, is there
any chance the Oscar nominee in the Warden's office isn't involved?
Didn't think so.
Two
words come to mind when thinking about Death Race's screenplay:
first draft. A loose remake of the 1975 Roger Corman flick Death
Race 2000, it throws together a loose round of ideas about how to stage
a Reality TV-era Death Race and put Statham's character in the middle of
it, but very few of them stand up to scrutiny or are what you'd do if you
stepped back and gave it some thought. Bad ideas start with taking
Corman's wide-open cross-country race and setting it on a closed track
the layout of which is never clear. Even worse is dividing it into
three stages, the first two of which seem to exist only because a movie
has three acts. Order of finish has no relevance in these opening
stages: they exist only so the drivers can race around and try to
kill each other. The cars are all outfitted with weapons both offensive
and defensive, but they only work if the drivers pass over round lighted
swords or shields that activate them. Even if Anderson were adapting
Death Race: The Video Game, I'd hope he'd leave out such an
utterly Xbox idea, but what makes it more shocking is that there is no
video game and this idea still occurred to him! I suspect there were
a whole lotta gaming breaks during the writing of this script. Even
if it wasn't so bad conceptually, the race would struggle to catch fire
since the cars, other than Machine Gun Joe's, all look the same, and the
track is grimy and visually uninteresting.
Then
there's the stuff that just makes no sense. The economy has collapsed,
but Death Race costs $250.00 for all three stages and claims more viewers
than the Super Bowl. Hennessey buses in hot chicks from the women's
prison as navigators to boost ratings, but those women are never seen in
any of Death Race's on-screen graphics and it's so impossible to see inside
the cars that Ames doesn't wear the Frankenstein mask while he's racing.
Then there's the nonsense that requires a ****SPOILER ALERT****,
like The Dreadnought, a giant bus of destruction Hennessey has been secretly
building, then unleashes at the end of Stage 2 in a desperate attempt to
alleviate the race's sameness. All well and good: as it plowed
through driver after driver, I thought of it as a nifty metaphor for reality
producers' aggressive moves to get their chosen contestants into the finals
(American Idol's Syesha Mercado has to be pretty glad there was
no Dreadnought in play when it came down to her and the two Davids), but
then it keeps running even once the race is down to just two competitors.
Who, I wonder, does Hennessey expect to overcharge the poor to watch race
on the final day if she kills all of the contestants? The climax
is a total dud, with the race fixed by all its' participants in at least
three different ways, so the audience that's been stupid enough to care
who wins gets no chance to find out. By this time, the movie's forgotten
that Joe's a psycho and instead decides he's pretty cool, even offering
a throwaway line to suggest he's really not gay, an assertion made earlier
in the most homophobic terms possible. Finally, there's an abysmal
tacked-on happy ending in which Joe is living so happily ever after he
doesn't even have the scars he'd cut into his own face (which, without
makeup, seems only half as wide as it was earlier). It doesn't match
visually or tonally with the rest of the film, and I expected someone to
shout “...and I just got this check for a billion dollars!” Earlier,
there's a scene that tries to set up Ames' silly closing narration in which
Hennessey, who's already planted a bomb on Ames' car, lays out a case for
him to stay on after he wins the race. Man, that woman likes to listen
to herself talk! ****END OF SPOILERS****
Performances
are about what you'd expect: luckily, some pretty good actors were
hired to enact this nonsense. Statham is swimming upstream against
a character pitched all wrong: Ames seems to have no ethical problem
with Death Race (he's only too happy to kill other drivers who've done
nothing to wrong him), which makes it hard for the movie to make it seem
like anything other than a really cool way to keep prison overcrowding
to a minimum. Having him be an experienced prisoner rather than an
innocent outsider undercuts his ability to be “our guy”, and while The
Transporter is his usual cool self, the movie gives him little of value
to do. Allen chews every bit of scenery that crosses her path, but
as Machiavellian masterminds go, Hennessey is a stone cold idiot, so it's
hard to generate much anger toward her. Plus, her climactic comeuppance
is too impersonal to deliver the goods. Coach is right in McShane's
wheelhouse and he alone is able to give his character dimension absent
from the script. I also liked Jason Clarke as Hennessey's odious
right-hand, Robert LaSardo as the most over-the-top of the racers, and
Stephens, who does everything in her power to make you invest in the outrage
of her death, even if the movie doesn't care nearly as much as it should.
Martinez gets the job done in a terrible role as conflicted eye candy,
but Gibson can only make Joe unpleasant, not a fun adversary, which makes
the things that happen to him near the end even harder to buy into.
Death
Race is one of those movies you buy into on principal out of the gate,
then slowly lose interest as it becomes more and more obvious that the
filmmakers are going to keep letting you down with one lousy development
after another. I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
save your money, and Netflix The Condemned
instead. |
