Death Race
So I guess a couple months have passed because we’ve got another
Jason Statham fistfighting car chase movie.
I am saying this with glee because I am a big fan of this guy and really
admire his work ethic of churning out three or four movies a year. And he doesn’t let his ego get in the
way. When he gets a call saying Michael
Mann wants him for one scene in Collateral,
Statham hears the ‘Michael Mann’ part of that sentence and not the ‘one scene’
part that would normally be a stumbling block for any egocentric actor looking
to rise through the ranks. And there’s
also no movie too absurd for this guy, I think I’d actually like to hear
pitches for movies that Statham has passed on and what would make him balk at a
project.
Death Race is another such absurd venture. It’s got the same plot points as the other
movie about tricked-out weapon-firing cars from this summer, Speed Racer. You’ve got the common man who’s muscled by
higher powers into a deadly race because he’s got well-known racing talent, then
he has to find a way to turn a rigged charade against the corporate megalomaniacs
who run it, but within the confines of the competition itself. Strangely this is an adult-oriented action
feature and Speed Racer was a kiddie
movie, but Death Race is much less
complicated and doesn’t throw all this confusing stuff about stock shares and
long lost brothers and intelligence agencies at you, they replace those things
with tits (read:cleavage), ass (read: in pants), and Ian McShane (read: dude
from a cowboy show that I don’t watch but am sure is good).
Statham is a great choice for this lead role, but I think he’s now
crossed the Arnold Schwarzenegger barrier where we no longer need an
explanation for their accent. They
mention in this movie that he came to the States from England in his twenties,
but I think Statham has reached the point where he’s just a force on his own
who doesn’t need a reason for why he talks differently than everybody else.
The supporting cast is okay.
Most of the other racers are unknowns.
I think they really should’ve gone all out with the other racers and
cast a bunch of DTV legends to give the roles more weight. I think having Statham racing against guys
like Tiny Lister, Dolph Lundgren, and Scott Adkins would’ve made these
character seem less like cannon fodder.
But they do have Tyrese as Machine Gun Joe. I’ve commented before that this guy is
frequently a lead in action car chase movies and never gets a love
interest. In Transformers he was also the only single guy in the movie. In 2
Fast 2 Furious I found it odd that he had no interest in women and that the
film ended with him dancing around Paul Walker while he kissed Eva Mendes with
no one of his own to kiss. Well, Death Race not only has the exact same
thing of having Tyrese dance around Statham while Statham kisses his love
interest at the end, but they also make repeated references to him being gay. So I’m now dead certain that Tyrese is
crusading to advance roles for gays in action films and I want to congratulate
him on his campaign.
Tyrese also has a funny ritual of scaring himself once for every
man he kills on the track. But he doesn’t
really go about it in a very orderly way.
The scars all kinda overlap so you it’s not really clear as to whether
he’s killed eight or twelve men. There was
a gunfight in The Quick and The Dead
who was named ‘Scars’ who did the same thing, but his were at least neatly
separated on his forearms. I’m not
demanding that the guy break it down into neat tallies on his back or anything.
I realize guys like the one Danny Trejo
played in Con Air are among the few criminals
with real vision as to how they’re going to display their crimes, but a bit
more planning in his look would’ve gone a long way. That’s all.
Joan Allen does a good job slumming in this one. Though I would’ve gotten more satisfaction
out of Laura Linney in this role. She
plays the sadistic warden and all the stuff with her strutting through courtyard
with rap music playing and all the convicts looking too scared to even look at
her was pretty fucking amusing. Her
bluestreak of cusses was also much appreciated.
The only other role in this movie I’ll discuss is the nerdy
guy. I want to thank them for not
casting Michael Cera in this role. While
I was waiting to get into this movie there was a big cardboard cut-out of this
dude to promoted Nick and Norah’s
Infinite Playlist (I guess they ran out of video game adaptations and have
now moved onto iTunes) and even though I’m one of the few people writing on the
internet who actually liked Juno, I
don’t want to see this guy in another movie again. After Superbad
I’ve had enough.
I know this director, Paul W.S. Anderson, is a very unpopular
filmmaker because of his involvement with the films Alien Versus Predator and Soldier,
but I haven’t seen either of those films so I don’t have the grudge against him
that everybody else does. I know he
usually does film adaptations of video games, and the crazy thing is that this Death Race movie is not based on a
video game. If it were, I’d be playing
it right now. Anderson does an okay job
with this movie. He didn’t edit it to
death, but he definitely assaulted it with editing in the parking lot and left
it kinda shaken. He definitely understood
the thrill of that clang sound when a dude’s skull hits something metal and it
really sounds like it hurts. And he did
a decent job with the car chases.
So I’ll say that this movie definitely fills that multi-week void
in between the previous Jason Statham car chase fistfight movie and the next
one. Thank you.
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