|
|
 |
| |
Jason Statham realises even Sat-Nav couldn’t rescue this film. |
Death Race? What an absolute load of scrap!
DEATH RACE
Directed by Paul WS Anderson
Certificate 15
IF ever the phrase “car crash of a movie” is apt, then surely this violent mess about convicts racing stock cars armed with rocket launchers is it.
This Jason Statham film tells a story about a man wrongly convicted of murdering his wife. We’re told by captions that it’s 2012 and the world economy has collapsed. Lots of people are being banged up in privately owned prisons where inmates take part in televised fights to raise cash for the owners. Statham, an unemployed racing car driver/perfect husband/perfect father, has been framed by the chief executive of a prison company who wants him to take part in a televised race to the death among other inmates to boost the ratings of a TV show they own – cue lots of eye-straining, blood ’n’ mud-splattered chases on an industrial wasteland.
There is an unholy trinity at work here made up of guns, cars and breasts. The makers of this flick use it to keep their hormonal male audience interested.
Jensen, Statham’s character, is joined by a motley, anti-establishment band of ne’er-do-wells, and their names provide an insight into how badly written this film is.
Meet Machine Gun Joe – a man who has a machine gun. Coach – Statham’s driving coach. Gunner – the man who fixes the guns on the car and (the best of all) Lists – a man who walks around with a notebook and, er, makes lists.
I suppose Death Race deserves one star simply for the moment of mirth generated where Lovejoy, telly’s dodgy antiques dealer and ladies man for Home Counties mums, appears as prison sage – think Morgan Freeman’s character in Shawshank. It’s so marvellously bad.
The dialogue, when managing to crawl out from the cover of large bangs, is delivered in slow and gravelly tones, as if the actors are going through a strange case of lifelong puberty, in which their voices just keep getting lower.
Worse still, all this TV gone mad stuff has been done before, and so much better: the Arnie film The Running Man trod this ground about 20 years ago.
While driving roughshod over this damnable hour and a half, it’s worth mentioning the soundtrack, played at ear-splitting volume. The cross between death metal and gangsta rap means when your ears aren’t being pained by gunfire and bombs, you’re being tortured by the very worst of two terrible musical genres.
Throw in a final scene of such awful schmaltz that will make you want to throw up, and you have the general gist of how completely awful Death Race is.
I have greater faith in adolescent boys – who must be the only target audience possible to watch this – than the makers. Even those whose minds are addled by hormones will dismiss this junk. |
 |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
