Sometimes the weirdest things manage to get franchise… Take Death Race for example – Paul WS Anderson’s grungy, big budget remake of Roger Corman produced 70s satire that replaced a masked David Carradine and a screaming Sylvester Stallone with the scowling features of Jason Statham. As it stands, the noisy bout of bombastic carmageddon actually stands as one of Anderson’s best (if still somewhat forgettable) efforts that played more like a nihilistic remake of The Longest Yard with killer cars. Moving the action from a cross country race to a prison that televises its inmates trying to kill each other in gladiatorial demolition derbys, shit blew up, Statham cracked skulls and and villianous Joan Allen got to swear like a salior – but with virtually none of the original players (including Anderson) returning for a direct to DVD follow up, who could fill the Stath’s sweaty prison fatigues? Um…. I don’t know. Is Luke Goss free? What am I talking about – of course he’s free.
Despite sporting a big fat two after it’s title, Death Race 2 actually pulls something of a bewildering gear change when it turns out to actually be a prequel and instead clues us in to the identity and past of the man who wore the Frankenstein mantle before Jensen Ames arrived at the Terminal Island prison complex. That man is the similarly bald Carl “Luke” Lucas who we meet as he oversees a bank job for mob boss Markus Kane as the getaway driver. Of course, shit goes south as these things always do and in the chaos, Luke manages to break his no kill streak when he unthinkingly shoots a cop dead in an attempt to escape. After a fiery car chase, Luke is caught and six months later, he finds himself incarcerated at Terminal Island after steadfastly refusing to give evidence against his boss.
Meanwhile, not that prisons are now owned by private corporations, Terminal Island has resorted to televising pay-per-view fights between inmates that are supposed to be to the death, but after a string of life sparing submissions, ratings are way down and that doesn’t make the Wayland Corporation particularly happy. Most unhappy of all is the host of “Death Match”, a disgraced former Miss America named September Jones who will do anything (and anyone, apparently) to get to the top and after watching Luke fight in a prison altercation, she desperately wants him for the arena.
However after Luke is manipulated into fighting on television, Markus Kane believes Luke is a loose end he can no longer risk and puts a hit out on him which obviously makes his day to day life even shittier. But even after amassing a small, loyal group of friends around him, Luke finds that things keep getting even more deadly when September figures out a way to change Death Match to make it more profitable. It’s simple really; why have racist psychos kill each other in hand to hand combat, when heavily armed cars are so much sexier.
Before we start, I just have to say that it’s gratifying to know that if The Meg franchise ever slips into the realms of delivering direct to video installments and can no longer afford Jason Statham, at least we know that Luke Goss can swoop in and fill his wetsuit at a moment’s notice (or if Ed Skrein’s agent is caught napping). Unnecessary spiteful jibes at low budget actors aside, making Death Race 2 a prequel is as smart an idea as the franchise has ever made as I always wondered why the first movie already came complete with a protracted back story to the Frankenstein character other than it being a rare call back to the 70s original. Having Statham’s character take up a pre-existing mantle means that the franchise has a back door to escape out of that means that not only does it free reign to do whatever it wants with its new characters, but it doesn’t have to remain overly beholden to whatever the first movie did other than have someone go “let’s put them into cars” as some point. Behind the directorial wheel, we find Roel Reiné, a man no stranger to banging out a large scale, low budget DTV sequel after being single handedly responsible for increasing the world’s supply of unwanted sequels thanks to such efforts as The Marine 2, The Scorpion King 3, Behind Enemy Lines 3 and, yes, Death Race 3. To give the man his due, he’s always been something of a workhorse in the realms of cheapjack sequels and while the cracks in the budget show a little, Death Race 2 does actually contain a decent amount of genuine car-nage in the three, explosion spewing car chases the film features. The first is pure Grand Theft Auto as an accent juggling Luke Goss (who must be wondering why Guillermo Del Toro isn’t returning his calls anymore), attempts to avoid the police with smash ’em, crash ’em results. Similarly, while the actual Death Races aren’t quite as impressive as Anderson’s were in the first film, the vehicle designs are still nice a cool with guns and armour virtually dripping off them.
Even the cast is faintly impressive. DTV veteran Danny Trejo obviously is present – he may not have even been cast, I strongly suspect he just shows up to these things and no one tells him to leave – and playing various villains are Sean Bean’s northern gangster, Ving Rhames’ corporate scum bag and, equipped with a push up bra and blood-red lipstick is The Walking Dead’s Lauren Cohen who seems to be relishing playing a complete bitch who unrepentantly has slept her way to the top.
However, with all the death matches and screeching cars, flying around, the movie seems to forget to make any of this interesting beyond smashing metal and skulls together. Goss may be appropriately chiseled, but beyond the fact that he’s fairly adept at getting into flamethrower fights (a full fifteen years before John Wick spinoff Ballerina) and glaring over a steering wheel, Carl Lucas is a fairly boring hero and none of his pit team of misfits (not even Trejo playing a Jewish Mexican) manage to become more than just glorified background actors to the action.
However, even though the action sequences carry plenty of wallop, they’re edited in such a strangely disjointed way that it, makes the races oddly hard to decode. Some shots are cut too quickly, others are lingered on a bit too long and the result is a series of sequences that should rock hard, but just feels the wrong kind of disorientating. In fact, the ending that sees the legend of Frankenstein hastily thrown together is also just is strange. Maybe it would have been more shocking if we gave a shit about the whole Frankenstein plot to begin with, but when the film ends with a mangled Luke sitting in the driving seat looking like Jason Voorhees has been reinvented for an Aphyx Twin video, you feel absolutely nothing.
Far better than it has any right to be, Death Race 2 simply can’t escape the confines of the fact that it’s very existence as a DTV sequel denotes it as a step down. Still, less demanding viewers will have to admit that heavily tooled up cars roaring around the track blowing lumps out of each other is still pretty hardcore.
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