Jon Peters Reviews: “Death Race”

I’m starting to find an annoyance in the critic world. It’s been brewing for some time in me and now I’m done. I hate when critics use the term ‘it’s like a video game’ when describing a movie. You just know that someone like Roger Ebert doesn’t come home from the Chicago Sun-Times and pop in ‘Medal of Honor 4′ and beat some guy’s ass online. Most of these critics know squat about video games. It’s a hollow term, perhaps lazy, to use. I believe some video games have better plot than most movies. Even video game based movies aren’t ‘like a video game’. The closest to that term was ‘Doom’ for its first person point of view, but if anything video game based movies are just empty fun.

Case in point: ‘Death Race’.

I really can’t say much about the original ‘Death Race 2000′; it was fun, imaginative, but Roger Corman developed better films and Paul Bartel directed better films and car crashes. It’s a film not without flaws and giving the right motivation could easily be remade without question. Except for the fact that we question anything Paul W.S. Anderson directs. I mean, what film has he directed that hasn’t got ripped? ‘Mortal Kombat’, ‘Soldier’, ‘AVP’, ‘Resident Evil’, and yes, even the immortal ‘Event Horizon’. Funny thing is, outside of ‘AVP’ in which I just downright hate, those other films aren’t bad. Now before internet fan boys send me hate mail, I will say none of his films are good in anyway. They’re mostly good in a bad way. Even everyone’s favorite ‘Event Horizon’, which is a decent sci-fi, although it’s a splash of many other better films, has that Paul W.S. Anderson (PWSA from now on) attitude of ‘look, this is so cool’.

But getting back to ‘Death Race’, the film is all muscle and no substance. Expect anything else? I firmly believe Jason Statham cannot act; he just growls and looks mean. Actually, most of the cast does this, even Joan Allen. The action is so fast, so blurred, so badly edited, I wonder why there’s an action choreographer for this films. Essentially, Michael Bay has ruined action scenes. You can see what he has done in his films and his copycats. Like ‘Speed Racer’ earlier this year, ‘Death Race’ doesn’t allow the audience of a firm placement of where each car is. PWSA uses zooms, quick cuts, and loud noises to show the frantic nature of the race. Bah. I want an action director to for once, just place the bloody camera right there and film the action in real time. Bartel is probably rolling his eyes right about now. Go back and re-watch his films ‘Death Race 2000′ and ‘Cannonball!’; those had incredible car crashes and well-staged action scenes.

I’m not against the idea of what PWSA has done with the story. The original had the race as a cross country marathon, with goals like killing certain pedestrians for points. Here, it’s all within the prison. There are some neat ideas left untouched that I felt could’ve made this movie a hell of a lot better, but PWSA will not allow for those to happen. Look at the disaster that is ‘AVP’. Out of all of the stories, he came up with that? He does the same here and getting back to what I was talking about video games earlier, I was saying to myself, ‘damn, this would be one cool ass video game’. It would and the comparison isn’t unwarranted. During the race, there are sewer lids with icons on them. Drive over them and you gain that weapon. It’s like PWSA has blurred a line between video games and film, who is inspiring who?

In the end, the film is cheesy. Mean muscle men, with a bad hip-hop soundtrack, no story, and yet somehow I found myself reluctantly enjoying another PWSA film. Make no mistake, it’s a bad film, with the only inspired moment coming at the beginning with David Carradine’s voice as Frankenstein, a return cameo from the original. Now, where’s the video game at?