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August 28, 2008

"Death Race" dies on screen

<a href="mailto:souellette@pressrepublican.com">By STEVE OUELLETTE</a>

Remaking a low-budget Roger Corman flick is not exactly akin to tinkering with "Casablanca."

Even so, writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson's "Death Race" is an action-packed disappointment.

Corman's campy cult classic "Death Race 2000" isn't really very good either -- and became obsolete just a year after "Space: 1999" and a year before "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- but it didn't take itself seriously and at least made a wild stab at social commentary.

Anderson, not to be confused with Paul Thomas Anderson (the good Paul Anderson), brings his trademark video-game approach ("Mortal Kombat," "Alien Vs. Predator," "Resident Evil") to the film and plays the loosely-based remake almost completely, numbingly straight. There are lots of bullets flying and cars driving fast, but it still manages to be bland.

The film is set in the very near future -- apparently the current election didn't go well -- when the economy has collapsed and the overburdened prison system is run for profit, producing original reality programs like gladiatorial "Games" and "The Death Race." In the latter, inmates in heavily armed cars compete in deadly races with the promise of freedom at the finish line.

Jason Statham stars as Jensen Ames, a former race car driver who finds himself wrongly imprisoned at Terminal Island. There, the icy warden (a strange career choice for Joan Allen) tabs him to take the role of Frankenstein, a wildly popular masked driver who has sadly but secretly expired (but not before a cameo by David Carradine, who played the role in the original).

Statham, who has driven fast before in "The Italian Job" and "The Transporter" films, has to do little more than glower and grunt his lines. Ian McShane is pretty good as Ames's prison mentor, Coach, while Tyrese Gibson ("Four Brothers") is the chief enemy, vicious fellow driver Machine Gun Joe (Sylvester Stallone's part in the original).

Where the original features a cross-country race that gives competitors points for hitting and killing pedestrians, "Death Race" takes place in an enclosed prison/decaying city/track. It's essentially set up like a video game, with the cars even driving over various power-ups to gain weapons control.

There's some decent action in "Death Race," but it becomes repetitive, and there's not a lot of inventiveness. Frankly, it doesn't even have a shot at cult status.

Rental Recommendation: Arnold Schwarzenegger finds himself forced into gladiatorial games for a TV audience in the cheesy but violently fun 1987 film "The Running Man." Grade: B-

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