Not Fast, Not Furious

A whole raft of decisions had to go into making a Death Race reboot. For starters, someone had to go and look and remember that Death Race 2000 existed. Don’t get me wrong, I love that film, but despite it being a Box Office success when it came out, it was much more of a cult hit by the time 2008’s Death Race reboot rolled out (no pun intended). One has to think that a studio exec somewhere said, “Roger Corman made a film called The Fast and the Furious, and there’s now a whole The Fast and the Furious franchise that’s unrelated to the original film. Maybe we can do the same?” Hollywood does love chasing trends, whatever they may be.

But then the studio had to decide what kind of film they wanted to make. Death Race 2000 is a subversive, black comedy that plays gleefully in the exploitation genre with lots of gore, lots of nudity, lots of stupidity. There was no way that Universal Studios, who made 2008’s Death Race, would let the remake be the same kind of film. It couldn’t be as subversive, or political. It couldn’t have all the gore and nudity. It had to be sanded down, brought mainstream, given to a director who could do what the studio wanted.

So that’s how we ended up with a Death Race remake helmed by, of all people. Paul W.S. Anderson, the guy behind Mortal Kombat, the Resident Evil films, and Alien vs. Predator. If the film were smarter, Anderson would have been an interesting choice for the film. He could have made something dumb, silly, even high camp, playing to the worst of his impulses in the best possible way. But it’s clear Universal wanted a franchise starter here. Maybe something explicitly campy, like the original Death Race 2000, just wouldn’t. So they somehow both let Anderson do his kind of movie, but refused to let it be as stupid as it could be, leading to a film that somehow feels like the worst of both worlds.

Jason Statham plays Jensen Ames, a former race driver who left that life behind when he met Suzy, who quickly became his wife. He settled down, grabbed a factory job, and played father to their new baby, Piper. But his good life couldn’t last. The factory he worked at shut down, stiffing him on a lot of money. And then a masked individual broke into his house and killed his wife. With a spray of some toxin, Jensen was knocked out, only to wake up with the cops standing over him, the bloody knife from his wife's corpse in his hand.

Sent to prison for murdering his wife, Jensen ends up at Terminal Island Penitentiary. There, Warden Claire Hennessey (Joan Allen) runs the Death Race, a pay-per-view violent coliseum of carnage where prisoners race against each other to the Death. The current winner, Frankenstein (voiced in a cameo by David Carradine) has won four races. If he won one more he’d have been set free, fully pardoned. The only problem is that Frankenstein died in his last crash right at the finish line, killed by rival three-time-winner Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson). The Warden needs a new Frankenstein for the ratings, which is why she had Jensen framed for the murder. Now if he wants to get free, and get back to his baby girl, he’ll have to win Frankenstein’s last race. That is, if the Warden lets him even have a chance at survival.

Written and directed by Anderson, the 2008 Death Race is really bad. To be clear, though, it’s not enjoyably bad, not in a silly and fun way like with Death Race 2000. No, the Death Race is an incompetent film that is just hard to watch. It lacks the fun, the subversive charm, the idea that everyone is in on the joke about how dumb and silly this movie is. There are times where it feints that way, or tries to have it both ways. For the most part, though, this is just a bad movie made on a budget one hundred times as big as its predecessor, and it’s hard to understand where all that money went.

On the plus side, Jason Statham is his reliable self. While not his best performance, Statham at least tries to imbue Jensen with the qualities you want to see in an action hero. He’s tough, but vulnerable, caring about others while also able to focus on the task that needs doing. It’s not a character that really pushes Statham at all, more or less feeling like yet another “default Statham character” where the only defining traits are his British accent and the actor’s scowl, but it does work in context. You know what you’re getting when Statham is in the lead.

Some of the side characters are pretty solid, too. I enjoyed Ian McShane as Jensen's head mechanic, Coach. Of all the actors on set, McShane knew exactly what he’d signed up for and he plays his character with a breezy detachment that shows he’s in on the joke even if the rest of the film isn’t. I also felt like Natalie Martinez was decent as Case, Jensen's navigator. While she isn’t given much to do she has decent chemistry with Statham and the actress is able to make her character more lively and interesting than anything that was on the script page.

On the film side, most of the rest of the actors are very much out of their depth. Gibson was clearly cast in this film because he’s from the The Fast and the FuriousStarted as a film about undercover policing in the illegal street-racing community, this series has grown to encompass a number of different genres and become one of the most bankable franchises in the world. franchise. It’s obvious from the plot machinations that Gibson’s Joe is eventually supposed to team up with Jensen, and the two can create a kind of “brothers in arms” bond, like Gibson’s character had with Paul Walker’s Brian O’Connor. But Gibson feels lost in this role, given barely anything to do but glower, and then when his inevitable turn comes, it’s not only not supported by the script but Gibson barely seems to understand how to sell it.

Still, he comes across better than Joan Allen as the Warden and Jason Clarke as her second-in-command, Ulrich. These are supposed to be our heavies, the ones that had the forethought and power to frame a man for murder, get him convicted, have him assigned to their prison, and then use him for their race, and yet that is barely supported by their performances. Allen seems bored here, unable to muster the energy to make her warden character interesting, while Clarke can’t do anything more than sneer and say bad one-liners. They’re our villains and they’re completely lacking in the villainy department.

Maybe that would all be okay if the racing part of Death Race were good, but the racing is actually what this film is worst at. Paul W.S. Anderson may have a knack for making video game-style action in his films (see all the ones I listed above), but he clearly didn’t have a clue how to film vehicular action. Everything is cropped too tight, the cameras shaking too much, overly edited within an inch of its life. You can never sense what’s going on, with no clue about momentum, where the cars are, or how everything connects together in a race. It certainly doesn’t help that the flashy cars from Death Race 2000 have been replaced with all black, metal vehicles that look the same. It all blends together in a way that you can’t see, and don’t care about, what’s going on.

Death Race should be a gleeful film, one that revels in all the carnage on screen. It feints at having some kind of message, about corporately controlled prisons and the fall of the middle class, but that’s quickly set aside in the name of vehicular combat. When that also fails, because it’s filmed so poorly, then all we’re left with is a hollow film supported desperately by a couple of actors trying their best (as well as one laughing at everything the whole time). This isn’t just a bad movie, it’s one of Anderson’s worst efforts. And it died at the Box Office because of it.

Sadly, even that couldn’t stop the direct-to-video march, so this film somehow got two prequels and a sequel. Sometimes there is no justice in the world…