Picked this up because the video store was out of Transporter 3 when I went there a few days after Transporter 3 released. It’s a bit of an older movie, but I didn’t think it was worth seeing in theatres, and I wasn’t even too excited about renting it. I’ll try to keep this short, because there’s really not that much to say.

Death Race tells the story of Jensen Ames (Jason Statham), an ex-con now trying to live his life legitimately as a steelworker. He has a bad day, however, when he loses his job and gets framed (and subsequently arrested) for his wife’s murder. He gets sent to the prison on Terminal Island, and is offered a way out by the warden (Joan Allen) – he can avoid his life sentence by winning a race as the masked champion, Frankenstein, in a competition called “Death Race.” This event is a three-stage (with each stage being on its own day) race to (you guessed it) the death. In heavily armed and armored vehicles, competitors must fight and drive to win. Ames of course takes the warden’s offer, and the movie goes from there. The crazy world that this sort of thing is happening in is one where unemployment and economic strife are at an all-time high, in the very near future year of 2012.

Cheesy "new guy" scene: check!

Basically this movie is as bad as it sounds. Tyrese Gibson plays Statham’s biggest competition in the race, and he’s as bad as (or worse than) he was in the second Fast and the Furious movie. Statham is Statham, and I can only imagine he was the only reason this movie was made. Joan Allen was better in the Bourne movies. What really broke the movie was that almost every line was extremely corny. It was just bad.

Tyrese Gibson demonstrates his acting prowess

The special effects were nice. The races held my attention. On Blu-ray it was visually fairly impressive. I can’t say I’ll ever watch this movie again though, nor would I recommend that anyone else watch it.

Explosions were probably the highlight of this movie

Oh, and one more thing:

Or maybe this was better than the explosions