Death Race (2008)
Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson
Terminal Island, New York: 2020. Overcrowding in the US penal system has reached a breaking point. Prisons have been turned over to a monolithic Weyland Corporation, which sees jails full of thugs as an opportunity for televised sport. Adrenalized inmates, a global audience hungry for violence and a spectacular, enclosed arena come together to form the 'Death Race', the biggest, most brutal event.
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26 films that influenced Death Race
What critics say influenced Death Race
Produced in 1975 at a time when the rising levels of violence in professional sports inspired both public outcries and a solemn, big-budget epic of speculative science-fiction based on that concept in Norman Jewison’s “Rollerball,” Paul Bartel’s “Death Race 2000” was a low-budget extravaganza from Roger Corman’s New World Pictures that combined bloody action and jet-black comedy to tell the story of a futuristic government-sanctioned cross-country auto race in which there were no rules, the contestants were free to knock out their competition by any means necessary and bonus points were scored for every pedestrian that they struck and killed along the way.
Death Race has more in common with homage-movies like Doomsday, the Rollerball remake, and Escape From L.A. than it does Mad Max, 1975's Rollerball, or Escape From New York.
Carradine, as fans of the original Death Race 2000 (produced by Roger Corman and directed by Paul Bartel in 1975) already know, played the masked driver Frankenstein, a racer in a two-lane-blacktop version of the equally nihilistic Rollerball (which came out the same year).
It's more variation-on-a-theme (by way of "The Running Man") than remake of producer Roger Corman and director Paul Bartel's campy 1975 drive-in classic, "Death Race 2000."
Yet it's not like Anderson didn't start with a reasonably sturdy foundation: The original film, 1975's Death Race 2000, is trashy fun, a campy Roger Corman satire with David Carradine and a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone as rival drivers in a nationally broadcast sport where the purpose (along with taking out fellow speed racers) is to run over as many people as possible.
Produced in 1975 at a time when the rising levels of violence in professional sports inspired both public outcries and a solemn, big-budget epic of speculative science-fiction based on that concept in Norman Jewison’s “Rollerball,” Paul Bartel’s “Death Race 2000” was a low-budget extravaganza from Roger Corman’s New World Pictures that combined bloody action and jet-black comedy to tell the story of a futuristic government-sanctioned cross-country auto race in which there were no rules, the contestants were free to knock out their competition by any means necessary and bonus points were scored for every pedestrian that they struck and killed along the way.
Based loosely on Roger Corman’s biting Death Race 2000 (1975), the movie pits a disgraced, rough-trade racing driver, Jensen Ames (Jason Statham), against amoral prison boss Hennessey (a silky Joan Allen), who has invented the ultimate pay-per-view thrill: snuff TV.
The film "re-envisions" the Roger Corman-produced, 1975 cult film (which was titled "Death Race 2000") and stars Jason Statham.
It's more variation-on-a-theme (by way of "The Running Man") than remake of producer Roger Corman and director Paul Bartel's campy 1975 drive-in classic, "Death Race 2000."
It's not a unique idea, having provided the backstory for more than one action movie (the most famous of which may be Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Running Man).
The year is 2012 and, in a mish-mashing of Rollerball and The Running Man, TV audiences crave death and destruction to keep them happy in a world in which - and how ominous is this? - the financial system has collapsed.
Skip it: Not only does "Death Race" recycle much of Arnold Schwarzenegger's "The Running Man" and 2007's horrible Steve Austin vehicle "The Condemned," but it doesn't even offer a character who thinks killing cops or broadcasting violence online is wrong.
As reconceived by writer/director Paul W. S. Anderson—the architect of such thematically vapid exercises in stylistic excess as Alien vs. Predator, Event Horizon, Mortal Kombat, Soldier and Resident Evil—Death Race now actually more closely resembles a cross between The Running Man and The Road Warrior, though even those comparisons offer it far too much flattery.
"Death Race" is a loose reimagining of 1975's "Death Race 2000," but it is just as derivative of any number of films, from 1987's "The Running Man" to 2007's " The Condemned ."
In an opening reminiscent of Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar in its focus on the intricacies of skilled manual labor, Ames emerges from a dying steel plant on its last day of operation to a minimal pay packet.
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Death Race has more in common with homage-movies like Doomsday, the Rollerball remake, and Escape From L.A. than it does Mad Max, 1975's Rollerball, or Escape From New York.
Created by prison warden Hennessey, the broadcast features violent criminals racing "Mad Max"-like vehicles on a closed course.
Visually, it's like a collision of Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Running Man and Mel Gibson's Mad Max.
"He moves them, inspires them - like Robert Redford in The Natural but in a muscle car equipped with machine guns and napalm."
Screenwriter/director Paul W.S. Anderson's version of the tale swipes as much from "The Longest Yard" and "Escape From New York" as it does the original film.
Just about everything here—from the setup to the so-called twists to the brutal race stages themselves—is culled from better movies, nearly all of them made in the ’80s: Robocop, Fortress, Escape From New York, the aforementioned The Running Man (also slated for a remake) and the Mad Max films, to name only a handful.
Anderson's story is a mashup of Corman's original, apocalyptic corrupt prison warden movies like "Escape from New York," and videogame adaptations.
Death Race has more in common with homage-movies like Doomsday, the Rollerball remake, and Escape From L.A. than it does Mad Max, 1975's Rollerball, or Escape From New York.
Escape From New York + Mad Max 2 = Death Race.
It remains, to date, the only film that David Carradine (who also starred in the 1978 sequel Deathsport) and Sylvester Stallone ever made together.
Deathsport (1978), imagined by Corman as another (but cheaper) Death Race 2000, is essentially a sci-fi Roman gladiator movie in a post-apocalyptic fantasy future with motorcycles, a mad dictator and David Carradine as a mystic desert warrior captured and tossed into the bread-and-circuses arena where political prisoners are served up to the spectacle-hungry population.
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But before cutting bait and chancing it with the sharks, know that what lies ahead on “Death Race’s” Terminal Island is the most epically loaded triple-cheeseburger action movie since “Con Air.”
Though the “Death Race” story has a different book cover, Jason Statham’s character as Jensen Ames and then the masked Frankenstein can be directly correlated to (as just one example) Nicolas Cage’s character in 1997’s “Con Air”.
Way back in 1975, mischief-minded director Paul Bartel (Eating Raoul), producer Roger Corman and screenwriters Robert Thom and the great Charles Griffith created a low-budget cult classic in Death Race 2000, a culture and media satire based on Ib Melchior’s scarily prophetic 1956 story in which a futuristic America rallies around a race in which points are scored by plowing over pedestrians.