Death Race (2008)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2008
	Director: Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil, Event Horizon)
	Actors: Jason Statham (The Mechanic), Joan Allen (Pleasantville, The Bourne Ultimatum), Tyrese Gibson (Transformers 1-3, Fast & Furious 2 5-7)
	Country: USA
	Genre: Action
	Conditions of visioning: 13.01.2013, Blu-ray, Home cinema
Synopsis: Jensen Ames (Statham), framed for the murder of his wife, ends up in a prison participating to a deadly car race organized by the warden (Allen).
Review: This movie is the remake of the 1975 classic Death Race 2000, in which the car race takes place from coast to coast across the USA, points are given to the racers when they kill on the road, the character of Frankenstein (played by David Carradine) has a grenade grafted to his hand so that he can blow up the President when he meets him after winning the race, and Sylvester Stallone plays a small role. You see that the movies don't have much in common except for the title, the tuned racecars and the mythic producer Roger Corman. Death Race 2000 actually reminds me more of the recent The Tournament in which the best assassins in the world meet in a selected town to compete for the "title", or of Gamer with Gerard Butler. The idea of collecting bonus on the road (ammunition, defence...) comes directly from the video game world and the movie is probably targetted to the same audience. The remake lost the main attraction for me (kill people on the road to get points!) and is annoyingly restricted to the jail environment (exit the totalitarian society and its leader, now the bad guy is only the jail warden), but the action is good although quite predictable.
Rating: 5 /10