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Death Race

Written by Edward Moran

 

Back in the 1950s, the United States Steel Hour was one of the preeminent prime-time programs in the so-called Golden Age of Television. Each week, the very best dramas were presented, and they were presented live, belying a theatrical confidence that paralleled the muscular certitude of America's blue-collar work force. The Steel Hour was introduced by an opening visual sequence showing a blast furnace in full glory, with molten metal pouring into humongous vats. It was the iconic signature not just of a TV show, but of the nation’s industrial heartbeat, as if viewers in a million armchairs across the land needed a weekly peek into the humming factories of America to reassure them of the triumph of industrial capitalism.

Blast-furnace sequences also lead off Paul W. S. Anderson’s just-released Death Race but rather more ingloriously, since the last steel factory in the nation’s rust belt has just shut for good. It is 2012, in a postindustrial, dystopic, police-state America where unemployment, crime, and mayhem are out of control. An unemployed steel worker–cum-race car driver named Jensen Ames (Jason Statham) is framed for the murder of his wife the day he gets his final paycheck and is hauled off into prison without benefit of judge or jury. Aptly named Terminal Island, the prison complex is the Devil’s Island of the new millennium, itself a decaying rust belt that stands as an eerie mirror image of the once-prosperous steel mills. On Terminal Island, though, there are no time clocks to punch since everyone is there for life. To pay their debts to society, the inmates participate in a vast scrap-metal operation, welding auto parts together to create racing cars that are at once ramshackle and ominous—twisted behemoths equipped with artillery and stealth technologies.

Presiding over this forlorn dystopia is a no-nonsense hard-shelled witch known only by her last name, Hennessey (Joan Allen). Frighteningly, Hennessey looks as if she could have been the understudy for Hillary Clinton in Revenge of the Arkansas Amazons. The woman-warden indulges her brutalist fantasy of pitting her inmates against each other in race cars like postindustrial gladiators, while she voyeurs them from her glass-enclosed podium. The last survivor of this macabre demolition derby wins his freedom, after a little romp in the shards with Hennessey, of course.

Jensen Ames, her particular favorite, dons a Frankenstein mask at her behest and with the other drivers is assigned a sultry female navigator yanked from a women’s prison for the ride. It’s a sex-charged 1950s jailhouse romp gone post-industrial. The action and special effects are lightning-fast, with megatonnes of horsepower, revved-up engines, drag racing, metal-shrieking collisions erupting into fiery pyres, drivers brutally slam-dunked by their rivals. It is made even more macabre when announcers interrupt the race to urge the viewing audience to shell out big bucks for pay-per-view of the mayhem—a once-virile American culture reduced to the blood and guts of the Roman Colosseum.

On the action-packed level, Death Race is often little more than a wet dream for testosterone-soaked teenage males, but on a deeper level it is an angst-ridden parable of contemporary American culture in which counterterrorism has replaced compassion. How ironic that the death race’s survivors, Jensen and Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson), one white and one black, escape together to Mexico for an idyllic life together in a vast outdoor chop shop, reversing the notion of the USA as the land of opportunity for migrants from afar. (The Asian and Latino contenders get offed in earlier stages of the race, offering an interesting binary commentary on state-of-the-art race relations: letting Jensen and Machine Gun Joe live is really the only logical outcome lest the film be judged a racist polemic, unless you're Asian or Latino, of course.)

But it's unfair to view the film as essentially as a racialist critique. Death Race is not a terribly profound movie—it’s still essentially a violent spectacle—but it does raise important questions about the direction of a nation whose soul seems as corroded as its infrastructure.

Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson
Written by Mr. Anderson
Based on the screenplay “Death Race 2000,”
Produced by Roger Corman and written by Robert Thom and Charles Griffith
From the story by Ib Melchior
Director of photography: Scott Kevan
Edited by Niven Howie
Music by Paul Haslinger
Production designer:Paul Denham Austerberry
Produced by Paula Wagner, Jeremy Bolt and Mr. Anderson
Released by Universal Pictures.
Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes.

Cast: Jason Statham (Jensen Ames)
Tyrese Gibson (Machine Gun Joe)
Ian McShane (Coach),
Joan Allen (Hennessey).