Death Race
IF YOU were asked to cast an actor for a film in which criminals have to race against each other to the death, husky-voiced Transporter star Jason Statham would be your perfect choice.
And so here he is in a remake of the 1975 hit, Death Race 2000, with original producer Roger Corman overseeing the tyre squeals.
Now 82 and still going strong, the Detroit-born Corman has worked on almost 400 productions as well as directing more than 50.
His Death Race 2000 featured David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone taking out pedestrians in a rather gruesome forerunner of Bruce Forsyth’s catchprase: ‘Points make prizes’.
Perhaps out of a need to do something different as well as to be more politically correct, the action sequences in the new Death Race are now mostly confined to the industrial wasteland of ‘Terminal Island’.
In a ‘correctional facility run for profit’, prison inmates race each other for freedom as well as for the purpose of entertaining a nation sitting at home with money to burn on pay-per-view – even though it’s 2012 when the US economy has collapsed.
Written and directed by Geordie boy Paul W S Anderson of Resident Evil trilogy fame, the action is suitably kinetic, the razored digital effects combining to literally dazzle.
Down at the Odeon New Street, my projectionist for the day, Rachel, even came in to see if I was happy with how loud it was. You bet!
Statham is the perfect man for jobs like this. As former NASCAR champion Jensen Ames, he wears his heart on his stubbled chin and growls like an old dog wanting one more bite of Hollywood ham.
Framed for killing his own missus, he is given the chance of wearing the show’s ‘Frankenstein’ mask to keep the fake character’s legend alive.
But, while he tries to earn his personal freedom, will it all turn out as you expect?
Playing Jensen’s Coach with a face like a 65-year-old bag of spanners is Blackburn-born co-star Ian ‘Lovejoy’ McShane (below), many of whose one-liners – ‘now that’s entertainment’ – are far too measured in a film of such breathlessness.
Fans of the old West Bromwich-made car the Jensen Interceptor will be intrigued to hear Coach claim he once had one, if not with the verdict that ‘It handled like a school bus’.
One thing’s for sure, triple Oscar-nominated star Joan Allen from the superior Bourne series must have been paid a few quid to play prison boss Warden Hennessey.
As the ‘baddest a** in New York’, she has to utter a hideously macho line.
