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DIRECTED BY: PAUL W S ANDERSON
STARRING: JASON STATHAM, JOAN ALLEN, IAN McSHANE
AS IT'S set in the year 2012 after the collapse of the American economy, the world's current financial woes might have accidentally made dystopic action flick D
eath Race seem prescient, but aside from the always-reliable Jason Statham and some bill-paying support from Joan Allen and Ian McShane, there's very little to recommend this loose remake of Paul Bartel's Roger Corman-produced 1975 grindhouse classic, Death Race 2000.
Blame that on Paul W S Anderson (Alien vs Predator) who has taken a big budget, a rock solid cast and an impossible-to-screw-up B-movie premise and transformed it into another generic Hollywood action flick full of muddy visuals and frantically edited smash-and-crash set-pieces.
Statham plays a former race-car driver set up for the murder of his wife and confined to a corporate-owned maximum security prison, where Joan Allen's ballbreaking, profit-oriented warden cares only about maintaining the ratings for her self-explanatory Death Race reality show.
In Corman's daft original this was a televised cross-country kill-fest where participants scored points for mowing down innocent pedestrians; now it's a Play Station-influenced track race, which grows tiresome by the second lap, especially once it becomes clear the film is going to be little more than The Running Man for fans of films like 2 Fast 2 Furious.
The full article contains 246 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
