Death Race 2 is a prequel to Paul W.S. Anderson’s 2008 remake starring Jason Statham and Tyrese. For those that have seen that movie, it’s the story of the birth of the “Frankenstein” character, but whether you’ve seen the original or not does not matter. This isn’t high art here folks even though director Roel Reine would like you to believe it is.
The story is hardly large enough to fill the 101-minute running time (99 minutes if you for some reason decide to watch the R-rated version) as it follows the story of Carl Lucas (Luke Goss) after he kills a cop in a bank robbery gone bad and finds himself on Terminal Island, a corporate-owned penitentiary where they are currently using the racial tension between inmates in televised battles called Death Match. In Death Match you need to either kill your opponent or get them to submit in order to win, which means it’s entirely silly Lucas would ever be sent there considering the feds want him to turn state witness against his crime boss Markus Kane (Sean Bean). Lucas isn’t exactly the kind of inmate you want to send to a prison where his chance of survival is pretty much zero… The same goes for his fellow inmate Lists (Frederick Koehler) who is basically the best example of “fresh fish” you’re going to find.
So Lucas must try and save his own skin, save Lists’s skin, deal with the macho woman that runs Death Match and wants to see him fight, try hook up with a hottie female inmate (Tanit Phoenix) and deal with the inmates trying to kill him for the $1 million Kane is offering so he doesn’t talk.
The film progresses and things evolve from Death Matches to Death Races and for as much time as Reine spends showing every ounce of footage he can in slow-motion it’s amazing how little time he spends going from one idea to the next. Reine seems to think it’s necessary for TONS of flashy slow-motion shots, MULTIPLE 360-degree pans and COUNTLESS “cool looking” inserts rather than focusing on telling the story. If this had been made with a bit of ’70s style grit it might have actually been decent, rather than just another direct-to-video feature.
Ving Rhames and Danny Trejo are also in the cast, but I have a hard time believing anyone in this mess did anything more than read the script one day, shoot the film the next and then come in a few months later to lay down some terrible ADR.
This disc comes with more special features than many feature films that tank at the box-office ever get, including three featurettes, deleted scenes, a director introduced montage of deleted scenes and an audio commentary with director Roel Reine. The Blu-ray also comes with a DVD and digital copy of the film.
Skip it, but if you absolutely must see it just rent it from Netflix. This felt more like a 15-minute short film stretched out into a 101-minute feature and the effects look so terrible you’ll cringe more than even laugh at how amateur it is. There’s an overhead shot of a Death Race driver named Hillbilly as he sits in a car on a sound stage and yells. It’s one of the worst shots I’ve seen of this sort and the fact it’s shot overhead means you don’t even get the green screen background whizzing by to sell the illusion. The whole production is just pathetic and it’s amazing to think this is what Sean Bean and Ving Rhames’s careers have come to.
