Word: film
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This summer has proved that the action film is where most of the talent has gone: into the technique and technology of pure moviemaking, of getting the viewer's blood racing by blowing stuff up. Handmade art is on the wane; machine art is here to stay. The gentle crafts of acting, of sculpting witty dialogue, of a director's subtle sense of where to lead the camera and the audience may be in decline, but the second-unit guys and stuntmen and CGI wizards are at the top of their game. It's not the highest form...
Move is what Death Race does; it's an eight-cylinder vehicle from which some prankster removed the brakes. It's got the red meat of fanboy film ardor: cars with guns - the movie's tag line is "Gentlemen, start your weapons" - and cons with girls. Though the picture doesn't deserve to appear on any critic's 10-best list, it observes the minimum standards of modern action films, which is to say it looks smarter, talks sassier and moves faster than almost anything else on the market...
...shows up every few decades (like Cary Grant or Michael Caine) and refuses to drop his working-class, home-town accent. Anderson must have figured that the star of the Transporter series, and The Bank Job and a couple of Guy Ritchie gangland fantasies, would bring along his action-film bona fides. Which he does. Also his impressive torso. One of the movie's few moments of relative repose is a long, loving shot of Statham exercising in his cell, the taut muscles of his upper back pulsing under his flesh like alien tumors. He certainly fits into the film...
...Real Death Race Death Race seems just fine, in its churning turbo-tone, until you watch the film that inspired it. Death Race 2000 was a snarky exploitation film put out by Roger Corman's New World Pictures. The director was Paul Bartel, best known for his elegant horror comedies Private Parts and Eating Raoul. The script, from a story by Ib Melchior, was by two Corman stalwarts, Robert Thom (Wild in the Street, Bloody Mama) and Charles B. Griffith, the seminal creator of early Corman monsterpieces, from It Conquered the World to The Little Shop of Horrors...
...Whereas the Anderson film is mostly confined, like the cons, to Terminal Island, Death Race 2000 travels from New York City (where the pedestrian traffic signs flash "WALK," then "RUN") to "New Los Angeles." And in contrast to the all-male gang in the new film, with the ladies reduced to riding shotgun, Bartel's drivers are equally split between men and women. David Carradine is Frankenstein, and a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone plays Machine Gun Joe, but there's also Warhol renegade Mary Woronov as Calamity Jane and Roberta Collins as Goth gal Mathilda the Hun. They...