The summer of 2008 began with a very bad movie about car racing, Speed Racer, and now it grinds to a halt with another one, Death Race. If I believed in conspiracies, I might almost think that this was Hollywood’s way of destroying our nationwide obsession with automobiles in order to combat global warming. These movies may not do that, but they certainly despoil the youthful memories of millions of viewers: Where the Wachovsky brothers’ movie was adapted from a junky 1960s TV cartoon, Death Race is based on one of the great Roger Corman cult movies of the 1970s, Death Race 2000. Even if you’ve never seen it, you’re familiar with the premise—a cross-country auto race set in a dystopian future where the cartoonish contestants (including David Carradine and a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone) gain points by running down pedestrians. (If you’ve ever looked at the people crossing the street in front of you at a red light and joked to yourself, “Old lady in a walker, two points,” you’re paying homage to it and writer Charles Griffith, who also wrote the original Little Shop of Horrors.) Unfortunately, this new version retains none of that black humor. In fact, all it keeps from the original is the broad notion of a lethal race and a masked driver named “Frankenstein.” Set a few years into the future in an America where the economy has collapsed, the race is a popular television broadcast in which prisoners compete against each other in armed vehicles. The last one alive wins, and anyone who wins five times gets to go free—or so they’re told. Jason Statham plays a former NASCAR driver shanghaied into prison by evil warden Joan Allen to boost the excitement level of the next race. This Death Race makes one other big, ill-advised change from the original: Instead of racing cross-country, the drivers do laps around a prison island. That’s a lot less interesting just on the face of it—the road movie, with characters exploring this vast, variegated country, was one of the defining genres of the 1970s. And this film is made even duller by the hyperactive camerawork and editing that ensure that you can never quite tell what’s going on during the races, other than that it is probably painful. The story can’t even be bothered to stick to the minimal rules of the contest in its efforts to provide unmotivated explosions and crashes for undiscriminating viewers. The director is Paul W.S. Anderson (please don’t confuse him with either Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson), who has made a career turning video games into movies, though never so obviously and dispiritedly as here. And while his name has disappeared from the on-screen credits (the Writer’s Guild strikes again), the script was initially credited to J. F. Lawton, writer of Pretty Woman. Only in Hollywood.
—m. faust
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