DEATH RACE (2008)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

One online review said that it was possible to view this movie as a "prequel" to the classic DEATH RACE 2000. While I like certain types of retroactive continuity, the two films don't even belong in the same conceptual universe. DEATH RACE 2000 is a film devoted to spectacle but which also broadly satirizes the human love of spectacle. DEATH RACE is a simple, straightforward adventure film with little interest in politics. Thus not only does the "death race" of the later film eliminate one of the first movie's most memorable tropes-- that of race-cars running down pedestrians as part of the demented game-- it also sand-blasts away the first movie's quirky peculiarities to deliver a fairly derivative thrill-ride.

Right away, a crawl informs viewers that the film's sociological villain will not be government in general, but privatized prisons. One particular prison is "Terminal Island" (cleverly named after a 1973 exploitation movie that looked for all the world like a Roger Corman production, even though it was not). Terminal Island's warden Claire Hennessey (Joan Allen) offers convicts the chance to race for eventual freedom by risking their lives in the televised Death Race. 

The only thing that separates protagonist Jensen Ames from dozens of other Jason Statham protagonists is that, because he's primarily a fast-car guy, the script doesn't give him the usual Statham martial-arts wizardry. Thus anyone looking for dazzling hand-to-hand battles will be disappointed: all the fighting is between drivers slamming their cars into one another. Ames is framed for his wife's murder and sent to Terminal Penitentiary, where Hennessey blackmails him into assuming the guise of Frankenstein, a driver who became a popular icon but who died in his last race. 

Like the Frankenstein of the Corman film, Ames-- who barely wears the mask seen in the 1975 flick-- gets a hot young chick for his navigator, this time named Case (Natalie Martinez). The remake almost entirely eliminates the arc her character had, except for the suspicion of being a traitor to the hero. Ames also inherits the previous Frankenstein's foremost enemy on the track, again called "Machine Gun Joe," but this time imagined as a modern gangbanger rather than a ganster, and essayed by Tyrese Gibson. The actor had up to that point only been in one film of the "Fast and the Furious" franchise, but as if anticipating his addition to that franchise's ensemble, this version of "Joe" ends up more ally than antagonist to Ames. Politically correct though this may be, it does deprive Ames of a major opponent on the roadway in order to place all the narrative attention on the evil warden.

The movie has more than its share of (dare I say it) high-octane chase scenes, complete with lots of crashes and uses of wild gimmicks, none of which are specifically science-fictional. RACE takes place in a "near-future" of 2012 because the script doesn't say anything more about governmental breakdown except as it pertains to prison privatization, while the 1975 film set its events further ahead in order to explain how America became so thoroughly effed up. However, while some near-future narratives are merely uncanny, the societal transformation for RACE seems extreme enough to justify the marvelous phenomenality.