With only a few days left of shopping, another option is to grab Paul W.S. Anderson’s Death Race on either DVD or Blu-ray. Beyond the break you can check out David Harley’s review for the forthcoming Blu-ray release, which stars Jason Statham, Joan Allen, Tyrese Gibson, Ian McShane and Natalie Martinez. Click here to write your own reviews.
While Death Race’s credits were rolling, I felt overwhelmed. Not because it was a good film (it isn’t) or had mind-blowing ideas at play during its almost two hour running time (it didn’t), but because I was frustrated with how much better it could have been. When Paul W.S. Anderson first pitched his remake of DEATH RACE back in the 90’s, it was a colorful CGI extravaganza of camp. Featuring glass-encased underwater raceways (and a point system!), its aesthetic qualities presumably would’ve mirrored those of SPEED RACER. It’s a fitting comparison, considering that DEATH RACE ended up being the antithesis to the Wachowski Brothers’ seizure-inducing kid-flick. Say what you will about SPEED RACER, at least it looked interesting and pushed the boundaries of CGI/live-action integration; DEATH Race is a boring and cold looking film. I get that prisons are industrial and bland looking, but there’s no way the general public would sit through a sports event that looks this dull and dreary. If there was something impressive going on, it was lost on me, seeing as how the edits were so fast, many of the race sequences were incomprehensible (Anderson admits as much during the commentary track, where he notes that the average edit is around a second long).

What bothered me the most is that it doesn’t really feel like a remake of DEATH RACE 2000, which is arguably one of the best B-movies of all time. I don’t mind the idea of the film taking place in a prison (barring the boring visual presentation), but when you combine that with no point system (which is really the main reason why the original is so memorable) and the lack of a campy sense of humor, DEATH RACE is really a remake of THE RUNNING MAN, with a dash of TWISTED METAL, via car power-ups, thrown in for good measure. I admire the fact that Anderson, at the very least, put his own personal stamp on the film by changing it up and using the “prequel” angle; I just wish he would’ve tried to steer away from video-game ideology and, at the very least, made a film that carried the spirit of the original.

Death Race comes roaring onto Blu-Ray with a fantastic 1080p AVC encode, carrying a crisp, clean transfer without any noticeable compression artefacts. The film looks bleaker than ever and the comprehensibility levels of the races are improved greatly, though they are still far from perfect. The DTS-HD 5.1 soundtrack on the disc is another great example of Universal going the extra mile for their lesser films. Watching the film with surround sound, I actually felt the cars and bullets whizzing by, which completely immersed me in the film during its racing sequences. DEATH RACE is a film that demands to be seen with an adequate sound system, as watching it with TV speakers completely ruins one of the only good things the film has going for it.

Special Features

U-Control – Universal usually packs their Blu-Rays with a lot of different U-Control PIP featurettes so I was very surprised to see only two on DEATH RACE. First up is Tech Specs, which contains a listing of every driver that opens up into their profile (sentence, convictions and driver’s license stats), race report (amount of kills and race victories), vehicle specs and a leader board. Earlier this year, Paramount tried using a real-time feature on CLOVERFIELD, which was a PIP map that was suppose to track the position of the monster, the main characters and the army. It was clunky and lagged severely every time I tried to use it. However, the leader board function here is great. It updated the second someone was killed or changed positions on the track. The “Picture-In-Picture” window rounds out the U-Control options on the disc and is, surprisingly, the best use of the Universal-exclusive feature I’ve seen thus far. It runs almost the whole film and features tons of behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, dailies and concept art. It’s so comprehensive that it renders the rest of the bonus materials on the disc useless.

Commentary – Anderson and producer Jeremy Bolt recorded a fairly informative track, though most of the information given overlaps with the other supplemental materials on the disc. Highlights include a discussion about the previous drafts of the script and their reason for tacking on that overly sentimental epilogue.

Start Your Engines: Making a Death Race (19:44) – A standard making-of featurette, acting as a overview of the vastly superior and far more in-depth Picture-In-Picture U-Control function.

Behind the Wheel: Dissecting the Stunts (7:50) – This short extra tackles to topic of what it takes to create a hyper-violent “wreck” of a movie, while resorting to CGI as little as possible. If anything, there is some really interesting footage of the techs and mechanics on set, as they go about rebuilding cars and prepping them for their next big scene.

Create Your Own Race – In theory, this is a great idea. Using alternate-angle clips from the movie, you can brush up on your editing skills and cut together your own version of the race, which you can then share online. Problem is, the footage lags between cuts, making it very annoying to watch.

Film: 2/5
Blu-Ray: 3.5/5