Death Race

Death Race (2008)

Ranking: Meh
Extremely Trashy

Remake of Death Race 2000 (which I haven`t seen as yet) and, apparently, shot in Montréal. Yeah! Another interesting factoid: Paul W.S. Anderson (not to be confused with Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson) has directed (in addition to this film) Resident Evil, Event Horizon and Alien vs. Predator, among other things. So... uh... yeah...

This movie is set in 2012 (holy shit, that's only three years from now. Fuck, Obama wouldn't even be finished his first term). The economy has collapsed (given the current state of the universe, I'm not surprised), police go around beating the shit out of people for no apparent reason (not surprised), people work in spark factories (not surprised) but despite the fact that everyone is poor, they are willing to shell out 250$ to watch 'Death Race' on the internet, which is essentially NASCAR only the racers are convicts and expected to kill one another (maybe a little surprised...).

Anyway, Jason Statham plays this guy who is framed for the murder of his wife (Janaya Stephens) and goes to prison. There, he is recruited by the evil prison warden (Joan Collins) to perform in the 'Death Race'. Of course, she promises to let him go if blah blah blah, she's fucking evil, why the fuck would he listen to her?

Needless to say, the movie is one long string of clichés which I don't care to list here coz there are too many. Trust me, they use every one in the book. It's stupid, pointless, it's like The Condemned only with NASCAR instead of WWE and even more like a video game if such a thing is possible. I mean, there were even power ups. Dude.

But I kinda liked it. I can`t fucking help myself. It was 100 minutes of unadulterated violence with occasional shots of hot chicks! (I did wonder why the inmates at the mens prison were all disgusting scuz monkeys but the inmates from the womens prison were all totally foxy. They didn't have uniforms, either.) Actually, that's a lie. There were huge gaps with, like, dialogue and shit (the dialogue was awful, as was the acting), but the action scenes were fuckin A.

All in all, I felt stupider after watching this movie, but I still enjoyed it in a weird sort of way. That's pretty much the way I feel about all of Mr. Anderson's films...

END

Directed by: Paul W.S. Anderson. Written by: Paul W.S. Anderson based on the film Death Race 2000 by Robert Thom and Charles Griffith. Starring: Jason Statham, Joan Allen, Ian McShane, Tyrese Gibson, Natalie Martinez, Jason Clark.