BY CONTRIBUTING WRITER ANDREW MARSHALL:
Question: What happens when one of the worst living writer/directors and one of the worst living producers team up to re-make one of that producers most ridiculous films, cast the film with mildly interesting character actors, a rapper, and an action star who is only decent when he’s directed by Guy Ritchie, and then hire a crack addicted goldfish to edit this steaming chunk of already doomed doggy doo?
Answer: Deathrace.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that going into “Deathrace” I only knew a few things: 1) It was called “Deathrace”. 2) It starred Jason Statham. And 3) It was a remake of the 1975 film “Deathrace 2000″ starring the late David Carradine and the not late Sylvester Stallone (who made “Deathrace 2000″ only one year before winning an Oscar for writing Rocky, which just goes to show you)
That being said, I was pretty sure it was going to be bad because 1) It was called “Deathrace” . 2) It starred Jason Statham. 3) It was a remake of a 1975 David Carradine/Sylvester Stalone film called “Deathrace 2000″.
However, I was watching this particular film at the behest of my friend Tracy and she had expressed some fear that I would simply mock the movie the entire time. Determined to prove her wrong, I was willing to try and hold my tongue and give the film a chance to impress me, or at least not make me hate my life for an hour and a half.
Unfortunately for Tracy, that resolve crumbled within minutes, if not seconds, as several things came to my attention at once. The first was that the film opens with about eight pages of text that tries weakly to explain the back story of “The Deathrace”. Any time you have to use more than one title card to explain things in a MOTION PICTURE you are probably in trouble already.
The second was that the producer credit for this film went to none other than Rodger Corman, a man who inherited the mantle of “Worst Filmmaker Alive” from Ed Wood in the late sixties and went on to be responsible for some of the worst atrocities against cinema in the last fifty years. (notable among them is a 1994 never released version of “The Fantastic Four” that will make even the most die hard comic book fan move out of mom’s basement, get a girlfriend, and swear never to look at another super hero again) At that moment it occurred to me that Corman was probably the evil force behind the original version of Deathrace, and a quick peak at IMDB has proved me right.
The third thing I noticed was that the film was written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. (Not Wes Anderson, the genius behind “Rushmore”, “Bottle Rocket”, and “The Royal Tenenbaums”, and not Paul Anderson, Wes’s brother and the genius behind “Magnolia” and “There Will be Blood”. No. Paul W.S. Anderson, the twisted troll behind the Resident Evil movies, Alien Vs. Predator, Event Horizon, Soldier and Mortal Combat.) When that filmography rattled painfully through my head and combined with the other aforementioned elements, I turned (triumphantly) to Tracy and exclaimed “We’re in trouble”.
Seeing as how I’ve spent five hundred words just explaining the set up for this movie, I’ll try to be brief with the plot. It should be easy because the plot is basically this: Jason Statham is a wrongfully accused man sent to prison in a distopian future where prisoners compete in a televised “Deathrace” in order to win the chance of their freedom. Oh, I could spend some time explaining that Jason Statham was some kind of race car driver but lost his license for something, or that the warden and producer of Deathrace sent a prisoner to kill Jason’s wife and frame him for it so that she could replace one of her top drivers, but “Deathrace” doesn’t really spend much more than thirty seconds explaining these things so I don’t see why I should. Suffice it to say that Jason Statham drives really fast, kills a lot of people in a variety of gory ways, dodges explosions, gets in prison fights, does pull ups, gets the girl, gets his daughter back, kills the warden, escapes the prison, and sets up an auto repair store in Mexico. He’s not alone, of course, he has the help of a mechanic called “Coach” who has been behind bars so long that he turned down parole because he was afraid of the outside world. Jason also has a rival and future escape partner in fellow competitor “Machine Gun Joe” (Tyrese, a singer/actor who is famous for…um…)
This film objectifies and fetishizes everything under the sun: women, cars, violence, blood, testosterone, etc. The ridiculous lengths that Corman and company go to just to get beautiful women into a prison movie, and the dehumanizing way in which said women are presented and filmed is in and of itself a fantastic reason to give your wife a kiss on the cheek, present her with a flower, and tell her how much you respect her empowered femininity. (The babes are shipped in from a woman’s penitentiary upstate to be “navigators” for the drivers. All in tank tops, all beautiful, and all not a good idea in a man’s prison, me thinks. All this is being explained to the backdrop of quasi-porn music and a long slow motion shot of jiggling women shaking out their hair as they get off a prison bus. Objectification is super classy, innit?)
I don’t think there was a single shot in the film that lasted more than two and a half seconds, and two thirds out of all the five billion shots were filled with squealing tires and brain jarring explosions. Every dramatic element was cliched, every spoken word was delivered badly, and every camera move was pointless and distracting.
But the weirdest part is, this movie included several startling similarities to another film that made me sit up and go “wait a second…I’ve seen this before!” If it pleases the court, allow me to present my case.
1) Coincidence number one: A man wrongly accused of killing his wife is sent to prison.
Exhibit A: The Man Wrongly Accused
Coincidence Number Two: The sadistic warden is either responsible for this frame up or at least was aware of it.
Exhibit B: The Evil Warden
Coincidence Number Three: In prison, the Wrongly Accused Man meets an older gentleman who cannot cope with the thought of living in the outside world.
Exhibit C: The Caged Bird
Coincidence Number Four: He also meets a black man who helps him escape the prison.
Exhibit D: The Buddy
Coincidence Number Five: After escaping, the two men retire to run an honest business in Mexico.
Exhibit E: The Mexican Finale
Sound familiar to anyone? Frank Daramont, does that ring a bell for you? How about you Stephen King? Something you may have scribbled down somewhere?
So here is my theory. Paul W.S. Anderson was sitting at home one day. His wife (Milla Jovovich!!! Which just goes to show you that there is absolutely no justice in this world) was off actually having a career, so he was by himself. After eating a whole box of ding dongs, drinking a handle of tequila, and watching “Deathrace 2000″ on Spike TV, he fell asleep. While asleep, his cat stepped on the remote and switched the channel to TNT, where “The Shawshank Redemption” was playing four times in a row. Echoes and strains of Frank Daramont’s classic adaptation of Stephen King’s even more classic story slowly seeped into Anderson’s sugar and liquor addled brain and there combined into an unholy stew with the flotsam and jetsam of Roger Corman’s film making. When Anderson was shaken awake by Milla the next morning, he crawled into his daughters room and wrote the script for “Deathrace” with a black crayon on that wide ruled paper with the dashes in the middle that teaches kids how to form letters. When finished, Anderson took the pages (all three of them) directly to Roger Corman’s house at 666 Devilstone Drive, where they fleshed out the details. Neither one having ever seen an actual good movie, much less “The Shawshank Redemption”, they weren’t aware that they basically ripped the plot out of a classic film about the enduring power of the human spirit, peed on it, then stuck it into a car chase movie about the enduring power of explosions to entertain the mindless moviegoers of America. Next came the production meeting with the Executive Producers: Satan, Hitler, and the Wiggles. Hitler mentioned Jason Statham for lead. Anderson said that he’d heard that Statham, a decent actor, was tired of making mindless action tripe and was thinking about going back to England to work for Guy Ritchie and make good movies again. Satan said he was pretty sure he could do something about that. No one is sure what he did, but Statham ended up in the film. The Wiggles sang some songs and then they all went to lunch. The rest, as they say, is movie magic.
SO WHAT’S THE MUCK?
Why Should I Run: If you don’t have a screaming headache by the end of this movie, you have the attention span of a parrot.
Why Should I See It: The uncanny similarity to several actually good movies will have you believing that the above scenario is real.
The MuckOmeter: 6.5. But only because I saw Captain America Two the night before. In any other circumstance, I might have thrown a lamp through the television in sheer outrage, but as it was I was just happy not to be looking at Reb Brown.
