406 - Death Race review

“Death Race” is the sort of film I suspect will have defenders that explain “it’s the kind of movie where you can turn your brain off and not think about.” Fine enough, I’d say, although when you’re trying to dredge up 500 words or more to say about a movie, you have to think, no matter how stupid what you’re watching is.

The film is hammered together with a level of passion more suggestive of one putting together a spice rack than a multi-million dollar work of art. Muscle cars padded with steel plates and stocked with machine guns race around a closed-course and pump thousands of rounds into one another, running over power ups and careful monitoring their life bars to ensure they don’t give out.

The premise: in the economically depressed future, American prisons are run by corporations that make big money by sticking the inmates into weapons-laden cars, allowing them to participate in often-lethal races, and then selling pay-per-view subscriptions of the event. These events get viewer numbers of up to 70 million, we’re told, which makes me wonder how the economy can be so bad if so many people can afford a $250 TV show.

Jason Statham plays the hero, a laid-off factory worker unable to properly support his family. In a pointless opening scene, he gets shot with a rubber bullet by riot police, which reminded me that in an Orwellian future, the law enforcement industry will always thrive. Unfortunately for Jason, an evil prison warden (Joan Allen, seriously) saw both “The Transporter” and “The Transporter 2” and decided that he needed to be framed for the murder of his wife and forced to participate in the race. Of course, the hero is really pissed at this, because upon finding his wife’s corpse he looks as if he were having a particularly difficult bowel movement.

The cars loop around the track, which looks like it was once what Roger Ebert would refer to as a “smoke and steam factory.” Fortunately for the teenage boys too dumb to circumvent the parental controls of their home PC’s internet browser, each of the drivers gets a hot babe from the ladies prison to serve as their assistant. Jason clearly wants to break off a piece of his assistant, but seeing as she’s in prison for murdering her husband, I’d suggest that he politely ask if she has a sister.

Most of the racers suffer grisly demises: pumped full of lead, beheaded by trucks, roasted by napalm, blown up by end-level bosses, red-ringed by their X-Box 360. Never before has a movie dedicated itself so joylessly to video game ideals, dispensing the violence plain and cold, without any noteworthy or fascinating stylistic concerns, as if making it interesting would be a disservice to those who paid for something that aims straight for the ground. At least it succeeds admirably at hitting that target. Don’t worry, though, we’re told via concluding voiceover that the film’s theme was love all along.

Crummy movies like this often feature interesting performances from actors capable of enjoying the material, but here the actors recite their lines in a manner that’s worse than bad, devoid of human feeling. I’ve seen hundreds of bad screen performances, but the ones in “Death Race” are non-performances, perhaps the most realistic looking wood puppets in the history of cinema.

“Death Race” is loosely based on “Death Race 2000,” a 1975 cult flick. In that one, the racers were not prisoners, but celebrities and national heroes who drove cross-country in preposterously themed vehicles. Most memorable was that the racers were given points if they managed to run over bystanders. That film was the best kind of trash, a funny, bloody romp that sported some fair satire and was actually fun. If you’re gonna make a B-movie, then why not do it with a smile, right?

1 out of 5