Film of the Week: Death Race

Death Race (15)

By Mike Polanyk

This one brought back memories. I was a student in Liverpool in 1975 when I reviewed Roger Corman's original Death Race 2000 at the local ABC.

I loved the movie, although I was at an age when senseless violence and nudity really appealed. Now, more than 30 years later, here's the remake – and it's great fun.

Death Race is a pacy action thriller set in a post-industrial wasteland, featuring the world's most brutal car race.

A prison full of pumped-up felons has inspired the jailers to create a grisly pastime. They're showing their death race in a spectacular arena to a global audience hungry for televised violence.

The star is three-time speedway champion Jensen Ames (Jason Statham), in prison for a murder he didn't commit.

He's forced to don the mask of the mythical driver Frankenstein — a crowd favourite who seems impossible to kill — by Terminal Island's warden (Joan Allen).

So, his face hidden by a metallic mask, he will be put through an insane three-day challenge. Ames must survive a race with the most vicious criminals in the country's toughest prison to claim the prize of freedom.

Driving a monster car equipped with machine guns, and grenade launchers, he must destroy anything in his path to win the world's most twisted spectator sport on earth.

Statham isn't a great actor, but Hollywood loves him, and here he gets away with it because he's either in a mask or snarling behind the steering wheel.

It's a gritty and simplistic actioner, directed in a fast and frantic style by Paul WS Anderson, the man behind the Resident Evil series of films.

There's no message, it's pure smash-and-grab entertainment. Just sit back and enjoy it, then go home and forget it.

Rating 3/5