Screenhead

You’ve really got to hand it to Jason Statham.  The guy is practically a video game character in his own right–look at some of his recent roles.  He was a hitman in Crank who had to jump from adrenaline rush to adrenaline rush in order to keep his heart from collapsing under the influence of some weird Chinese nerve drug.  Then he shows up in In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, which actually WAS a video game before Uwe Boll got his hands on it and turned it into, well, another Uwe Boll film.

And then he shows up in Death Race, the remake of the original–which might well have been the first ever video game movie (Death Race actually was a video game at one point–I remember playing it in an old arcade).

This time, Statham plays a down-on-his-luck steelworker whose mill just shut down (shades of the current economy, huh?).  He goes home for the night, expecting a simple, safe night in with his wife and newborn daughter when it all goes horribly wrong.  Statham ends up in prison, framed for his wife’s murder, and offered a terrible choice.  Either he can spend his life in prison–which may not be that long–or he can join the Death Race circuit, a sort of gladiatorial stock car race in which prisoner drivers race heavily armed cars to the death.  Statham signs onto the Death Race circuit, racing as legendary driver Frankenstein, a man so disfigured by his numerous crashes that he needs to wear a mask.  Throughout the movie, we follow the Death Race circuit through a three-stage race (shown on pay-per-view for the ridiculous price of ninety-nine dollars a circuit or two hundred fifty dollars for all three) as Statham discovers that the race has plenty of secrets, and almost none of them good.

With a plot like that, we all have a pretty good idea that this isn’t going to be an Oscar contender.  Nor will it make a lot of sense.  Rest assured there will be several good plot holes going on here, and more than a few headscratching moments as racers you’ve never seen before suddenly die on the race track.  And though Oscar wouldn’t spit on this movie if it were soaked in its own high-test racing fuel and set on fire, you can take it to the bank that this will be at the very least a fun movie.  Plenty of blood and fire and explosions and attractive women in a supporting capacity say that this is eventually going to show up on Spike in an extremely edited fashion.  And the commercials leading up to its release will be absolutely nuts.

And that’s most of what you can say about Death Race–it’s big, it’s loud, it’s violent, and it’s crazy.  Jason Statham turns in a solid performance once again, and his supporting cast is no slouch in its own right.  In fact, there’s very little wrong with the movie.  It was made for a couple hours of shutting your brain off and watching stuff go vroom and stuff go boom.

You will probably enjoy it, as long as you don’t look too far under the hood.

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