Skip to main content

Death Race: Jason Statham Gets Naked

Death Race is a modern remake of a cult sci-fi movie from the 70's starring Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine. I'm going to stop there, because other than the name, this movie has very little to do with the original. Honestly it's more of a mashup of Running Man and Mariokart than anything else.

In a futuristic world, the hot sport is Death Race, where life term convicts are placed in heavily modified death dealing cars, and put on a race track together. Win five races, and you get a full pardon. The thing I like about Death Race is that the game itself is actually fairly well thought out, it has rules, beyond just make it across the finish line at any cost. Each Death Race even is split up into three stages, which occurs over a number of days, it's only important to come in first in the final stage, other than that, you can just focus on taking out rivals, and surviving. Each vehicle has an arsenal of defensive and offensive weapons, which are electronically locked out for the first lap, during the second lap, panels on the track light up, a sword for offensive weapons, and a shield for defensive. Once you drive over one of these panels, the respective weapons are turned on, and that panel goes out, drivers have to make sure to hit the panels with all 4 tires, or else their weapons don't get activated. Additionally there are panels with skulls on them that open up traps, which are a wall of spikes that rise out of the ground, and once your car is impaled, they slowly sink back down, causing a car crusher like effect.

The driving action is certainly a lot of fun, and a guilty pleasure, as are the fight scenes. It's a little disappointing that Jason Statham, who clearly fights better the fewer clothes he wears, isn't more of a badass in a movie where he gets completely naked.

There is a story about Statham's wife getting killed, and he being framed for it, which ties all into the warden's need for a replacement for her star driver, "Frankenstein". But really, watching a movie like this for story is like going to a strip club for the drinks.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Y: The Last Man: Even Spambots Cry After Reading It

Right off the bat, I'm going to say that Y is the saddest story I have ever taken in, with an emotional punch like a locomotive (or a bomb if you will). No work of fiction has ever destroyed me emotionally like this has. That being said, the story may be a tragedy, but gettin there was a lot of fun. The story starts off with every male mammal on the face of the Earth being almost simultaneously wiped out by some kind of illness. With the exception of English major/escape artist Yorick Brown, and Ampersand, a capuchin monkey that he's volunteered to train to help people with disabilities. There's no apparent reason as to why they survived, they just did. At the time the plague hit, Yorick's girlfriend, whom he was about to propose to, was on a trip in Australia, while he was in Chicago. Naturally he sets out to find his true love. Along the way he picks up the companions 355, an agent of a secret government organization called the Culper Ring, and Dr. Allison Man...
2 comments
Read more

Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day

This appears to be a time for disappointing sequels, although for awhile there, we got a lot of top tier extremely competent sequels. I guess no trend can be permanent. The first Boondock Saints was one of those rare creations that had just about the optimal amount of everything, it was balanced between being believable, ridiculous, funny, and brutal. Balanced is the last word I would use to describe the sequel. The dialogue is terrible, just about everyone in the movie talks like a middle school bully. There are honest to goodness slapstick comedy moments, such as a mafia liutenant getting smacked in the face with a salami, and then a follow up seen where he's forced to wear headgear and can't speak properly. The tone of the entire movie is just so very different from the original, that it feels like it was made with a different director/writer, with a different vision for what the movie should be. All the more sad, since it's the same writer/director, Troy Duffy,...
2 comments
Read more

Prototype Status: Beat

For the longest time I was stuck on a ridiculous boss fight in Prototype, so I shelved it for a couple of weeks. Of course as is usually the case, I brought it out to show it to a friend, and tore through the boss like it was no big deal, so I finally beat the story over the weekend. A major complaint that I've had with the game, and indeed, many other action games as well, is that boss fights all require you to play the game in an entirely different way. In Prototype, you are typically the toughest thing out there, and you regularly square off against multiple opponents at the same time, while tearing them apart with brutal melee attacks. Then you get the boss fights, a number of which mostly involve you just running around, trying to get a heavy object to throw at them very hard. Becuse if you were to get within melee distant of them, they just use some attack that instantly stuns you. As I said, this seems to be a problem with most action games, not just Prototype. I was s...
1 comment
Read more