DEATH RACE: Anyone Can Wear the Mask, Not Just Anyone Can Drive the Car

Death Race (2008) – Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson – Starring Jason Statham, Joan Allen, Tyrese Gibson, Ian McShane, Natalie Martinez, Max Ryan, Jason Clarke, Frederick Koehler, Jacob Vargas, Robin Shou, and David Carradine.

I love DEATH RACE, which is as lean, mean, and violent a car movie as you’re going to find.

I love car movies: Cannonball Run, Smokey and the Bandit, Speed Racer, The Fast and the Furious, Herbie the Love Bug … if a movie has awesome cars going fast, I’m going to … wait for it … take it for a ride. (Shalit!) Heck, I’ll even watch the Herbie movies without the Shaggy D.A. and with I’m a Mac (though I’ve never seen the one with Brisco County, Jr.). Of all the car movies, DEATH RACE offers the literal most bang for your buck. There’s a solid story here about a man named Jenson Ames (Jason Statham) who’s framed for the murder of his wife in order that he end up at the Terminal City prison to drive in the Death Race in the Frankenstein persona (who’s more Stig than the original Death Race 2000 Frank), and writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson has done a marvelous job balancing the action and the story.

It’s incredibly hard to make a movie like DEATH RACE of this kind of quality. Like so many films today, DEATH RACE is caught in the liminal space between A-List and B-List features. Paul W.S. Anderson mines this area of B+ movies as well as anyone. Just take a look at his directorial credits: Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon, Soldier, Resident Evil, Alien vs. Predator, and two of the Resident Evil sequels. That’s a whole lot of quality, balancing mid-range budgets and mid-range casts. Most of the films grab either a genre star or borderline A-list star with solid acting skills and puts them into a simple to understand but difficult to get out of predicament.

(I think I need, “Simple to Understand, Difficult to Get Out Of” on a poster near my computer, because it’s the perfect mantra for telling solid, adrenaline-packed, stories.)

DEATH RACE hits all the marks I want out of a B+ movie:

1. A Compelling Lead – Jenson Ames is a perfect vehicle (Shalit!) for Jason Statham. Wrongly accused, infused but not burdened with a recently acquired moral center, and given free reign to tap into the violent tendencies he thought he had left behind him, Jenson allows Statham to do what he does best: growl, look at the camera over his shoulder, fight, make dry remarks, and take his shirt off. There are some actors with the range to walk over wide plains. That’s not Statham. His range is limited but it is finely honed and fiercely delivered, and if you join him on his turf, it’s inevitably you who will follow his lead and not the other way around.

2. Good Story – Largely covered above, DEATH RACE tells a small story in big explosions. There’s a prison. There’s a race. People die. Almost everyone’s a scumbag. Around that middle, Anderson adds the proper flourishes: the evil warden, Hennessey (Joan Allen), her vile sidekick, colorful secondary antagonists, kick-ass cars, and a bit of eye candy.

3. Colorful Characters – DEATH RACE adheres to the Skittles School of Casting, making sure we’ve got a diverse cast, and the casting folk do a good job giving us actors who are included because they fit the movie rather than some racial or ethnic checklist. Tyrese Gibson has been in both car movies (2 Fast 2 Furious) and sci-fi movies (Transformers), making him a perfect choice for the antagonist-turned-protagonist’s-sidekick role. Robert LaSardo has an extensive resume of playing bad guys, and he’s used here perfectly. There’s not much to his character, but he’s cast for his personality and he can take a few scenes and work them for all their worth.

4. Good Casting – The most inspired choice here is Joan Allen as Hennessey, which DEATH RACE a little bit of acting cred. Allen has been nominated for three Oscars, so seeing her show up to play a one-note bad guy is pretty awesome. She totally gives herself to the role, too. There’s no sense she’s just here because she needed the paycheck. Similarly, Ian McShane virtually floats through the movie, and the movie uses him in a such a way as to continually tell you, “Yup, we’ve got Ian McShane.” He’s the mentor, the smart guy … he’s basically Shawshank Redemption‘s Morgan Freeman and James Whitmore merged with Days of Thunder‘s Robert Duvall.

5. The Right Look – DEATH RACE has an awesome, post-industrial look. Everything is cold and hard and grey. Except for the explosions.

6. A Recognition of What It Is – I do not mean this in a dismissive way. I simply mean that what DEATH RACE wants to be is exactly what it delivers at a very high level, and so in terms of conception/execution, DEATH RACE is every bit the equal of Boogie Nights or Steel Magnolias.

7. Good Action – It’s here where DEATH RACE really delivers. The car racing scenes are very well shot, showing off both the cars and their drivers. The cars are characters, too, and Anderson does an excellent job keeping these cars unique from one another. One of the things that drives me nuts about a movie like Transformers is how all the robots end up looking the same, in part by their design but mostly because Michael Bay keeps his camera in way too close. The action happens so fast from so close that it’s hard to keep many of the robots apart in my head. That’s not the case here. You might not know that Jenson drives a Ford Mustang or that Machine Gun Joe (Gibson) drives a Dodge Ram or that 14K (Robin Shou) drives a Porsche Carrera, but you know they’re different cars, which is impressive given how all of the cars are rendered in grey and covered with all sorts of weapons.

DEATH RACE has been called both a remake of Death Race 2000 as well as a prequel, but really, DEATH RACE is more properly thought of as a remake of Shawshank Redemption with cars. It’s a wise decision. Shawshank is the best prison movie ever made (or, at the very least, the most recognizable prison movie for contemporary audiences), and Anderson does a good job taking it and remaking it as a post-apocalyptic action flick. I’ve mentioned the way Coach takes part of Morgan’s character (the wise old man) and Whitmore’s character (he can’t live outside the walls of the prison) to create an easy suit for McShane to stroll around in, but we’ve also got the wrongly-convicted protagonist, allusions to forced sodomy, a prison warden using the prisoners’ skills for their benefit, the warden’s primary henchman being a sadistic prison guard, the dramatic night-time escape, and the epilogue escape to the warmer climate of Mexico. Jenson and Joe are joined by Case (Natalie Martinez), Frankenstein’s navigator, and Jensen’s daughter, setting up a wonderfully odd little family unit, and giving a post-apocalyptic car movie as good a Happily Ever After as you’re likely to find.

The sequence that makes me love DEATH RACE comes during the second of three races, where Jenson and Joe team up to defeat a freaking Peterbilt 18 Wheeler overhauled to be one of the most impressively massive machines of death you’ll find. I love the way the film sets it up and uses it, and then quickly takes it away from us. It’s hinted at early in the film, then revealed in the second race, then eliminated in the second race, too, in an awesomely brutal collision. The Peterbilt could very well have been the basis for the third race, but by employing and eliminating it in Race #2, it elevates the personal drama for the third race.

There are imperfect moments in DEATH RACE, of course. Why is Jenson so worried about the Peterbilt truck in the second race when he knows the Warden needs him to get to the third stage to help the pay-per-view buys? (The races are PPV events put on to make money because prisons are run by corporations as for-profit enterprises.) Why does everyone keep looking over to his car and nodding and waving and whatnot, and why does Jenson nod and wave and whatnot back, when Coach has told us no one can see in the window?

Truthfully, I don’t care. From the opening sequence where David Carradine’s voice is used for the original Frankenstein and right through to the Mexican ending, DEATH RACE is flat-out enjoyable.

LONE WOLF MCQUADE: How’d You Like to Bite That in the Butt, Develop Lockjaw, and Be Dragged to Death?

Lone Wolf McQuade (1983) – Directed by Steve Carver – Starring Chuck Norris, David Carradine, Robert Beltran, Barbara Carrera, Leon Isaac Kennedy, L.Q. Jones, and William Sanderson.

Even though I’m reviewing LONE WOLF MCQUADE as part of Western Month, it’s not a Western in the classical sense. Instead, MCQUADE is a contemporary Western-slash-martial arts-movie-slash-standard-’80s-action movie. Director Steve Carver soaks his film with a Western score that might as well have been taken directly from an Ennio Morricone compilation, and the end result is a mildly effective mix of genres.

I mean, look, it’s an awful movie in a traditional sense, but it’s not an awful Chuck Norris movie, and it’s the film that inspired Norris to make Walker, Texas Ranger, so we owe/”owe” it that.

I’m being honest when I say that I just don’t get the appeal of Chuck Norris. He has no personality, he’s a terrible actor, and I don’t like or care enough about martial arts movies to know if he’s really any good at the punching and kicking. He is perhaps the most unintentionally brilliant camp actor of all-time, but I don’t think 1983 audiences were going to his movie on that score, so I’ve chalked Norris’ appeal up to being something I just don’t understand.

Norris plays J.J. McQuade, a “lone wolf” Texas Ranger who doesn’t want to partner up with anyone – including his new partner, the Texas State Trooper Kayo Ramos (Robert Beltran). We know McQuade is a real American hero because when he attends a fancy event and they tell him they don’t have any domestic beer, he passes on the Heineken and Dos Equis. Had the Most Interesting Man in the World emerged at that moment to kick his ass, we might have had something.

But he doesn’t.

We know McQuade is a bad ass because he drives a dirty Dodge truck that, for some unspoken reason, is a super truck. It’s got some crazy boost system that allows him to rocket down the highway. He gets buried inside the truck deep in the movie and after he pours beer on himself to wake himself up after getting the crap kicked out of him, drives the truck out of the ditch.

Where, let me repeat, he was buried. Under dirt. God F*cking Bless America.

We also know he’s a bad-ass because he lives in a crummy, ramshackle house outside of the city with a wolf.

Yep. With a wolf.

You also know he’s a bad ass because he shows up to a retirement ceremony all dirty from his latest bust and proceeds to take a nap. And hiss boss hates him because McQuade doesn’t fit his idea of what a Ranger “should look like,” and we know from every cop movie ever made that if your boss hates you, you are totally awesome.

The film doesn’t just want McQuade to be an All-American Bad Ass, however; it wants McQuade to have feelings. He loves his daughter (they even share an awkward lip-to-lip kiss), and she loves him, proving he’s a good dad. Even though he’s divorced from his wife, they’re still friendly, proving he’s a good divorcee. He takes his daughter horseback riding, where he ogles Barbara Carrera, and then he just leaves with the new hottie, apparently abandoning his daughter at the track, which proves he can be a bad dad, but an understandable man. When the bad guys kill his wolf, McQuade is so overcome with grief that he pounds his fist into the dirt, then picks the dead dog up.

The bad guy is David Carradine. He has a name (it’s Rawley) but names aren’t really important in a film like this because you spend the whole movie waiting for Norris and Carradine to fight. Carradine is wonderfully awful as the would be kingpin who’s also really good at martial arts. He also has a personalized license plate that reads, I sh*t you not, “CARATE.” He’s making it with his ex-partner’s widow, Lola (Barbara Carrera), who’s the movie’s eye candy and leads to the best line of the movie. McQuade’s best pal in the Rangers is the just-retired Dakota (L.Q. Jones), and they’re watching Lola ride a horse. Dakota asks McQuade: “How’d you like to bite that in the butt, develop lockjaw, and be dragged to your death?”

McQuade apparently thinks this sounds like fun because he grins. I think it sounds awful. (What if she’s a farter? Do you really want to die with your mouth clamped onto someone’s ass cheeks?) Lola and McQuade end up spending time together, but when McQuade comes home to find Lola cleaning up his sh*thole house, and then discovers she threw away his beer and replaced it with vegetables, McQuade flips his lid. “You’re killing yourself!” she wails after he tells her, “If I wanted my house clean, I’d get a maid!”

Right, because a maid would be better than Barbara Carrera.

And let’s be honest. I might not understand the appeal of Chuck Norris, but he walks around with his shirt off quite a bit and he doesn’t look like a guy letting himself go. If he’s living on a diet of cheap beer and kicking bad guys teeth in, then I’d say it’s working.

McQuade’s daughter ends up getting kidnapped and that leads to a big fight and it looks like Norris is appropriately taking this as the most important thing EVAH. In contrast, Carradine looks like he’s ready to hang out and smoke lots of weed; he’s just got to take care of this punk b*tch first.

They build up to a big fight scene and it’s really pretty average, but then, I don’t know much about martial arts so who knows if it’s actually good. It looks slow and clumsy to me, and Carradine looks silly wearing his yellow sweater and Norris looks silly in his bandanna and vest. His daughter gets shot in the leg, which inspires him to go kick ass, and then Carradine backhands her and that inspires McQuade to overcome his injuries to kick even more ass.

McQuade learns to team up with the FBI and state police, and they learn to let him kick ass.

Everybody wins. Except for maybe the audience.

DEATH RACE 2000: You’re One Very Large Baked Potato

Death Race 2000 (1975) – Directed by Paul Bartel – Starring David Carradine, Simone Griffeth, Sylvester Stallone, Mary Woronov, Roberta Collins, Martin Kove, and Louisa Moritz.

It’s been an Ib Melchior kinda week.

Melchior co-wrote the screenplay for Robinson Crusoe on Mars, which I reviewed yesterday, and wrote the short story “The Racer,” which was the basis for DEATH RACE 2000. I wish I could say I planned it, but I didn’t. I rented DEATH RACE 2000 out of spite because Netflix still hasn’t sent me Cannonball Run, even after almost two months, and I’ve already watched the recent remake/boot/launch Death Race from a year or so back starring Jason Statham. (It’s pretty good.)

DEATH RACE 2000 features silly people in silly cars in a race across the country where they score bonus points by killing people.

It’s pretty awesome.

But awesome in that way that can only be achieved by being awful and enjoyable all at the same time. There’s not a single “good” performance in the entire film, except that everyone gives exactly the right performance. Which is the point. Everyone manages to be bad on exactly the same level, which results in a weird kind of cohesive performance that’s almost brilliant and certainly enjoyable from start to finish.

David Carradine stars as Frankenstein, an allegedly part-man, part-machine driver who’s survived countless vicious crashes over the years and become the most popular racer in the country. In actuality, Frankenstein (who wears head-to-toe black leather – complete with cape and mask – that makes him look not so much like Batman, but Wile E. Coyote in that suit that was supposed to make him fly) has been several different people, and Carradine’s only the latest.

Carradine’s take is to play Frankenstein as dispassionately as possible, which is to say he plays this ultimate bad-ass in as a stick of bambook swaying gently with the wind.

He drives a lizard car that actually manages to look cool next to the cars tricked up to look like a lion, German WWII plane, bull, and whatever Sylvester Stallone’s car is supposed to conjure up in your mind.

Stallone is the best part of the entire movie. His bombastic, ridiculous, over-the-top performance as Machine Gun Joe Viterbo is the perfect counterweight to Carradine’s woodenness. When his navigator gives him crap for getting beaten up by Frankenstein, Stallone cracks, “You know, Myra, some people might think you’re cute, but me, I think you’re a very large baked potato.”

What?

On one of the DVD’s bonus features, John Landis (who, according to John Landis, has a brief role in the film as one of Stallone’s mechanics) says the baked potation line was a Stallone ad-lib. Somehow that makes it even better.

Because you can’t just have a race where crazy people driving animal cars kill each other, there’s a back-plot involving Frankenstein’s navigator, Annie, played by the lovely Simone Griffeth. She’s the granddaughter of the head of the Resistance that wants to stop the race from happening. She vaguely tries to kill him and then has sex with him because he’s not what she expected.

You know, because he actually has a face and something of a conscience. Something of a conscience because he still kills people with his car, but we forgive him because he’s got a fake hand that’s actually a grenade (a “hand grenade,” get it? Ah, the ’70s) and he just wants to win the race so he can shake the President’s hand and blow the bastard sky-high.

In the funniest killing scene of the film, the nurses and doctors at a hospital line the street with all of their old patients. Annie wants to know what’s going on, and Carradine drawls, “It’s Euthanasia Day at the Geriatric’s Hospital. They do it every year.” So this year, because he’s now David Carradine under the mask, Frank kills the nurses that stand around watching and lets the old people continue to drool on their shirts.

This film relies on the dystopian American future idea, but they don’t harp on it. You’re not here to hear discourse on the decline of America, you’re here to see these ridiculous cars kill a bunch of people, have a few laughs, and see some women take their clothes off.

If that’s why you watched the movie, you win.