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..Michael Wilmington

..Wilmington On Movies ..MCN Critics Roundup ..MCN Review Page

Wilmington on DVDs
Burn After Reading,
Sangre de mi Sangre,
The Third Man...
plus, this week's box set picks

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COPICKS OF THE WEEK: NEW

Burn After Reading (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
U.S.; Joel and Ethan Coen (Universal)

In Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers take a satiric slash at several subjects that Americans often take very seriously indeed -- including politics, sex, spying and physical fitness. The Coens are in a savagely playful mood here -- and, with their usual visual/verbal finesse and mastery of American movie gothic, they introduce us to a typically Coenesque comic ensemble, a bunch of self-deluded Washington D. C. dummies afflicted with various levels of sublime ineptitude, appalling idiocy and bizarrely dysfunctional fashion sense.

These hapless but oddly egotistical characters are played brilliantly by a cast that includes George Clooney as an ex-secret service guy obsessed with penises, Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt as knuckleheaded gym employees caught in a morass of self-improvement and blackmail, John Malkovich as a bad-tempered, alcoholic, fired CIA analyst seeking revenge with a tell-all memoir, Tilda Swinton as his obnoxiously arrogant, mean and faithless snob wife, Richard Jenkins as McDormand’s love-struck, good-hearted employer and David Rasche and JK Simmons as the flabbergasted (and sometimes clueless) CIA agent and superior who’ve been monitoring the whole mess.

Burn After Reading is beautifully crafted, smart as a whip and funny as hell, but it’s not a classic, perfectly articulated comedy in the way No Country for Old Men is a classic noir thriller/drama. It amused me mightily much of the way, but it suffers occasionally from a kind of wacky elision in the storytelling. The Coens sometimes eliminate key scenes and instead tell us what happened afterwards, as they also did, a little annoyingly, with the unshown climactic gunfight at the end of No Country.

On the other hand, why carp at two of our best moviemakers because they screw around and don’t make an inarguable masterpiece every time out? Like Blood Simple and Fargo, Burn After is a noir nightmare, featuring an ensemble of liars and goofballs so addled by lust, greed or criminal endeavor that every misstep they take brings on fresh disasters.

The inspirations for Burn After were modern paranoid spy thrillers by Tony Scott (Spy Game, with Pitt) and writer Robert Ludlum (Doug Liman‘s film of The Bourne Identity), those slick, scary movies in which unusually attractive and confoundingly resourceful characters stumble into a Byzantine machine of betrayal and deceit, and have to scheme, race and fight their way loose. (Clooney‘s Michael Clayton is another example). In this case, however, the Coens reverse the model: the characters’ deadly fixes are brought on by their own stupidity and self-deception, which keeps escalating to mind-boggling levels.

The movie is lustrously visualized, wittily written and gorgeously shot (not by Roger Deakins this time, but by Emmanuel Lubezki) and it’s also superbly acted by the whole goofball ensemble, even though how hard you laugh may depend on your own tolerance for human stupidity, especially in Washington quarters. (George W. Bush and Dick Cheney become more comprehensible as we watch these nitwits.)

A common complaint against the Coens is that their humor is misanthropic and anti-human and that their characters are unlikable. But, if you admire their pictures, including the more variably received comedies (and I admire them, strenuously), it’s because you’re amused by their characters and you like or love the actors playing them -- which is just the kind of reaction inspired by Ealing Studio comic nightmares like Robert Hamer‘s Kind Hearts and Coronets or Alexander Mackendrick‘s The Ladykillers (which the Coens remade, to one of their worst critical receptions) or in the darker comedies of Stanley Kubrick and Billy Wilder. The Coens are modern masters of film noir, or neo-noir -- and conventional likeability isn’t necessary for their galleries of entrapped, fate-strangled clowns. Far from it. Burn After Reading gave me one hell of a good time, even as its cast of nitwits plunged into their own private hells of intrigue, exercise and schlong fixations.

COPICK

Sangre de mi Sangre (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
U.S./Mexico; Christopher Zalla, 2008 (ifc)

This Sundance grand prize winner is a riveting modern Mexican-American film noir -- or neo-noir if you will, with a terrific melodramatic noir gimmick, worthy of Cornell Woolrich. Juan and Pedro meet on a truck carrying them, illegally, to America. By the time they hit New York city, the evil Juan (Armando Hernandez) has stolen the bag, and the identity, of Pedro (Jorge Adrian Espindola) and is on his way to try to steal his father, Diego (Jesus Ochoa) as well. The characters and mean streets mood are really good here -- Ochoa’s Diego is a prize-worthy portrait of bitterness, meanness and surprising softness -- and there’s a fourth showstopper in Paola Mendoza’s devil-may-care druggie/hooker/squatter Magda. (In Spanish and English, with English subtitles.)

PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC

The Third Man (Blu-Ray) (Four Stars)
U.K.; Carol Reed, 1949 (Criterion)

Carol Reed’s original script is one of the best ever written; Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles (as Harry Lime, philosopher of the cuckoo-clock), Trevor Howard, Valli and Jack Hawkins make up one of the all-time perfect casts. And nobody plays a zither like Anton Karas. The British Film Critics picked this as their country’s best film of all time, just as we picked Citizen Kane and the French picked Children of Paradise. How can you argue?

PICK OF THE WEEK: BOX SET

Studio One Anthology (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
U.S.; Various directors, 1948-58 (Koch Vision)

Almost no television show epitomized the so-called Golden Age of live TV drama like Studio One -- which presented to American audiences everywhere within reach of a TV signal, a golden decade of quality live original theater from 1948 to 1958. (Playhouse 90, which had longer formats and just as strong a pedigree was the other one.) This lovingly assembled anthology pays a fitting tribute to the former show -- with 17 hour-long dramas from its heyday and four panel discussions and overviews from many of its later famous participants.

The dramas include Studio One‘s inarguable masterpiece, the original September 26, 1954 production of writer Reginald Rose‘s Twelve Angry Men, directed by Franklin Schaffner, and starring Robert Cummings (his all-time best performance in Henry Fonda’s later movie role of determined Juror No. 8), plus Franchot Tone, Edward Arnold, Paul Hartman, John Beal, Walter Abel and Norman Fell.

Here and elsewhere, we can see why they call it a Golden Age: a mix of great chancy scripts, and dedicated hungry young actors. We can also see why even the most celebrated Golden Age dramas, like the original versions of Paddy Chayefsky‘s Marty and Rod Serling‘s Requiem for a Heavyweight are so little seen today. These live videoplays were preserved on kinescopes, photographed from TV showings at the time, and their visual qualities suffer compared to the slick, clear images we’re used to today. Still, dramatically, they’re often amazing, and the fact that they were shot live -- by genius directors like John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet and Studio One mainstay Schaffner, gives them a real electricity and excitement.

Schaffner was one of the two Studio One directorial wheel horses, along with Paul Nickell; the main writers here included Rose, Gore Vidal and Rod Serling. The often young actors making some of their first precious mass appearances included Charlton Heston, Eva Marie Saint, Jack Lemmon, Sal Mineo, Lee Remick, Art Carney, and (in a serious part, written by Vidal) Leslie Nielsen. There’s a flash of James Dean in the overviews; maybe we’ll see more of him in any Volume Two.

This is a set that should be gobbled up by young writers and actors today, who will get to see what risks you can take and win with, when your means are limited and sponsors (like Westinghouse, represented by iconic pitchwoman, Betty Furness) will take some chances.

Includes: 1984 (Paul Nickell; 1953) From George Orwell’s novel, with Eddie Albert and Lorne Greene; Almanac of Liberty (Nickell, 1954) Adapted from William O. Douglas by Reginald Rose. The Arena (Franklin Schaffner, 1956) Written by Rod Serling; with Wendell Corey and Chester Morris. Confessions of a Nervous Man (Nickell, 1953) Written by George Axelrod; with Art Carney and Jacqueline Susann.

Dark Possession (Franklin Schaffner, 1954) Written by Gore Vidal; with Geraldine Fitzgerald and Leslie Nielsen. The Death and Life of Larry Benson (Nickell, 1954) Written by Rose; with Lee Remick and Morris. Dino (Nickell, 1956) Written by Rose; with Sal Mineo and Ralph Meeker. Julius Caesar (Daniel Petrie, 1955) Adapted from William Shakespeare, by Leo Penn. With Theodore Bike, Alfred Ryder and Shepperd Strudwick. June Moon (Walter Hart, 1949). Adapted from Ring Lardner, Jr. and George S. Kaufman by Gerald Greene; with Jack Lemmon, Eva Marie Saint, Edward Andrews and Glenda Farrell.

The Medium (Nickell, 1948). Music and libretto by Gian-Carlo Menotti; with Marie Powers. Pontius Pilate (Schaffner; 1952) adapted by Worthington Miner from Michael Dyne; with Fitzgerald, Cyril Ritchard and Francis L. Sullivan. The Remarkable Incident at Carson Corners (Nickell, 1954) Written by Rose; with Harry Townes and O. Z. Whitehead. The Storm (Yul Brynner, 1949 Adapted by Miner, from McKnight Malmar; with Marsha Hunt.

The Strike (Schaffner, 1954) Written by Serling; with James Daly and Bert Freed. Summer Pavilion (Nickell, 1955) Written by Vidal; with Miriam Hopkins and Elizabeth Montgomery. Twelve Angry Men (Schaffner, 1954) Written by Rose; with Robert Cummings, Franchot Tone, Edward Arnold and Paul Hartman. Wuthering Heights (Nickell, 1950) Adapted from Emily Bronte; with Charlton Heston. Twelve Angry Men and The Remarkable Incident at Carson Corners are rated Four Stars. The Arena, Confessions of a Nervous Man, and Dark Possession are rated Three-and-a-Half. All others are rated Three.

OTHER CURRENT AND RECENT DVD RELEASES

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (One Star)
U.S.; Rob Cohen, 2008 (Universal)

I’ve never much liked the new Mummy series -- the first two Stephen Sommers movies seemed frenetic, under thought and herky-jerky, full of CGI fury, signifying nothing. But I held out some hope for this one. New director Rob Cohen has made some fast pop movies, the new cast included Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, (which suggests good fight choreography), and Brendan Fraser’s nicely tossed off, Fred MacMurray-ish hero performance in Journey to the Center of the Earth hinted at a good time here too.

But….Yaargh! This is a real stinker: a movie that makes you feel as if you were being attacked by an army of idiots. Despite spectacular effects and shining photography, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor gives us almost nothing worth watching, and plenty that isn’t. Nothing in the script seems even vaguely salvageable, not even in the third-rate Indiana Jones knockoff terms set up here. Fraser acts as if he had a bad cold and would rather be somewhere, anywhere, else -- as if the only possible cure for his misery were a long trip far away from this movie.

Spouse Maria Bello keeps smiling inexplicably, as if she wanted us to believe she was Kate Beckinsale. Luke Ford, as their son, plays the most obnoxious juvenile to pop up in quite a while; not only is he a wildly implausible offspring of Fraser and Bello, but after a while his line readings and surly disposition make you want to see him devoured by dragons. Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh might as well have been subbed by Jet and Michelle puppets. The final ghost warrior attacks have a few good gags, but the editing drove me crazy. It’s a sign of where the movie is going, that Cohen takes us to Shangri-La only to blow it up. And though there was a war going on in China in the late ‘40s involving people like Mao Zedong, the major crisis here seems to be the plot to bring back the emperor -- a dead one.

Nobody goes to a contemporary Mummy movie for anything but cheap thrills -- or rather, expensive thrills that seem cheap. But you won’t believe this one until you see it. Which you shouldn‘t. You’d have more fun being mummified.

Mamma Mia (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
U.S./U.K.; Phyllida Lord, 2008 (Universal)

I wasn’t an ABBA fan in their 1974-82 heyday, when they were one of the world’s biggest pop groups -- though as someone with two Swedish-American grandparents, I might have had a little national pride, as I do for Ingmar and Ingrid Bergman and Victor Sjostrom. But they sound good now. And Mamma Mia, a movie musical composed of their song hits -- all originally written by ABBA members Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus (and non-member Stig Anderson) and sung at the time by those two, accompanied by their ABBA-dabba wives, Agneta Feltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad -- makes ideal use of that easy-going, irresistible music.

The ultra-catchy songs are strung around a fragile, amusingly absurd story about a wedding on a Greek island, involving Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), the gorgeous daughter of independent single woman and island resort owner Donna (Meryl Streep). Unbeknownst to her mother, the young bride invites all three of the men (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard) who were Donna’s lovers and may be her father, in order to find daddy Right. (Neither mom nor dad really know.) Three is the magic number here: Mom has two friends (Christine Baranski and Julie Walters) and so does the daughter -- and all of them, and the three guys, get heavily involved in the musical action.

There’s something delightful about the way the old ABBA songs summon up all the corny, cock-eyed romanticism that the story kiddingly whips up. The result, full of sunlight, rhythm, dancing and torch songs, didn’t remind me that much of one of the old MGM classics -- with their wit and finesse. But it did recall the 20th Century Fox musicals, with their pizzazz, high spirits, gaiety and occasional craziness. Carmen Miranda and Don Ameche wouldn’t have been out of place here -- and neither are Streep, Brosnan, Skarsgard, Baranski and the others. Mamma Mia has a powerhouse cast, though not necessarily for a musical. But when these dramatic actors start throwing themselves into it and selling these songs, it’s entertaining in a crazy way that plants an almost constant silly smile on your face. Streep, who sang well as the country-western star in Robert Altman’s swan song, Prairie Home Companion and who’s really game, shamelessly belts out her songs (like "The Winner Takes it All") with no brakes and lots of passion. And, if you don’t grin at "007" Brosnan, crooning away, your sense of humor is failing.

There’s a fantastic moment under the end credits when Streep, Waters and Baranski in clingy sequined suits, belt out “Dancing Queen." At the end, Streep steps up and asks us if we want more. The audience I saw it with did -- and the trio obliged them, joined by Brosnan and the guys in similar disco garb, for a roaring rendition of “Waterloo.“ Talk about magic moments. Abba may have been pop in a world the rock critics tended to define as punk. But punk never made you feel this good.

Traitor (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
U.S.; Jeff Nachmanoff, 2008 (Anchor Bay)

Don Cheadle -- who plays a conflicted Muslim American at the throbbing emotional center of the political thriller Traitor -- first made a big impression on me in 1995‘s Devil in a Blue Dress, where he stole the show as private eye Denzel Washington’s off-the-wall crony Mouse. Mouse was a wily little fast-talking hustler full of schemes and moxie, and I thought he was also one of the great modern psychopathic character roles. But as Cheadle has become a bigger, more important major star and an inarguably great actor, he’s tended to use that ability to get under your skin and assault your nerves in different, more socially respectable ways -- as he tries to do in Traitor. He’s become less of a Richard Pryor or James Woods and more of a Sidney Poitier or Montgomery Clift.

These days, we’re more used to seeing Cheadle the lead actor, in his sensitive, ennobled Clift modes: for example, as real-life hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, who rises superbly to the occasion in the shattering genocide docu-drama Hotel Rwanda. In Traitor, Cheadle is also in his sensitive mode, though he tries to keep us guessing about his true motives and morality. His role as Samir is seemingly just as challenging as Rusesabagina: an American Muslim and ex-Special Operations officer who may be either a turncoat tied to Islamicist terrorists -- pulling off murderous schemes with his ex-jail mate and friend Omar (Said Taghmaoui of The Kite Runner) -- or a double agent, reporting to free-lancing C. I. A. agent Carter (Jeff Daniels), the only other guy in the world who knows Samir‘s secret mission.

It’s an interesting idea. But Samir is really only an approximation of a great role in an approximation of a good movie, with Cheadle trying to pump ambiguity and intelligence into a basically bogus story. Shot in multiple locations, from Chicago to Paris to Yemen, Traitor is a would be humanist philosophical/political thriller, a movie that tries to adopt a liberal viewpoint to international terrorism, but keeps getting more and more wildly improbable and finally, goes haywire at the end.

The ending of Traitor almost feels like it doesn’t match with the rest of the movie. And maybe it doesn’t. Traitor’s loopy surprise climax was an idea of executive producer Steve Martin (the comedian-writer-actor), and it became the genesis of the whole project, with writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff dreaming up the events that lead up to it. I hate to sound like the usual critical smart-ass, but the great laugh-getter Martin’s idea here is closer to comedy -- extremely dark comedy -- than to the terse, nearly humorless realism and liberal humanism that Nachmanoff tries to build up during the rest of the film. Superficially, those early sections work better, strongly aided by J. Michael Muro’s hand-held doc-style photography. But when the surprise finally explodes, it seems almost callous and offensive.

Hamlet 2 (Two Stars)
U.S.; Andrew Fleming, 2008 (Universal)

Making an unfunny movie starring Steve Coogan -- that daffy articulate comic actor who, like Peter Sellers, seems to have an almost flawless instinct for getting the laugh --might seem a truly amazing achievement, especially since Coogan is backed here, in writer-director Andrew Fleming’s Hamlet 2 by a gifted supporting cast that includes inveterate scene-stealer and chuckle-inducer Catherine Keener, along with David Arquette as a confused-looking stud and Elisabeth Shue, playing herself -- or perhaps playing an Elisabeth Shue fantasy.

But talent isn’t everything, as Fleming sometimes seems to be suggesting, although perhaps his real message and theme is “Lack of talent is everything“-- which, in this case, seems like wishful thinking. Hamlet 2 -- whose title is its funniest part -- is an arch, forced, febrile tale of the doomed, idiotic Tucson Arizona high school production of an apparently witless script by a dopey, hysterical drama teacher named Dana Marschz (played by Coogan), who senselessly imagines himself as both Hamlet and Christ, while his life seemingly falls apart on all levels.

Not only has the school fired him and given him a mixed-ethnic class of Anglo brown-noses and Latino troublemakers, but his annual school play -- a slot usually devoted to Marschz’ banal staged adaptations of corny inspirational movies (like Dangerous Minds) -- has becomes a Tucson cause celebre, protected by a truculent ACLU headline-grabber and attacked by a bevy of right wing stereotypes. (Truth to tell, the stereotypes don’t seem that far from reality.)

Fleming is trying in Hamlet 2, to satirize Hollywood and the dopey inspirational movies that Marschz adores, although what he’s actually done is make an even dopier inspirational movie. Meanwhile, Coogan tries virtually everything to make us laugh, including running into class in drag and flashing everybody. (Even that left me grinless.) Unfortunately, Coogan’s contract apparently also required him to speak his lines, which, in this case, can’t be improvised into any kind of quasi-humor.

The House Bunny (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
U.S.; Fred Wolf, 2008 (Sony)

This one looked predictably corny and awful -- a comedy from the Legally Blonde writing team (Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith) about blond Playboy Mansion Hef-mate Shelly Darlingson (played by Anna Faris of the Scary Movie series) who supposedly gets kicked out of the Mansion as too old (she’s a venerable 27) -- though actually it’s through the machinations of a wicked housemate -- and ends up as a college sorority house mother for a housed full of lovable losers, wallflowers and misfits who’ve gotten themselves in an Animal House fix. They’re about to be decertified for lack of pledges, and they’re being sabotaged by the nastiest, snootiest, bitchiest sorority in town.

Naturally, Shelly pops up, spiffs up the sorority gals and seems to save the day, proving that Marilyn Monroe and Reese Witherspoon weren’t the only “dumb blondes” who weren’t dumb, and that its dangerous to call somebody vapid when you probably don’t know what it means.

Surprise: this movie is funny -- largely due to Faris, who manages, like MM, to be sexy, sweet and hilarious all at once. I loved her "Exorcist“ voice and her sex appeal tutoring and, in general, she cracked me up continuously. The House Bunny has exactly the stuff you’d expect. It’s full of dopey things, and there’s a whole romantic subplot with Faris and Colin Hanks that makes little sense. But, like Mamma Mia, this is a movie that may make you smile and laugh despite yourself. An added bonus: The Playboy mansion scenes have cameos for Hef and his Gleesome Threesome -- from that surprisingly diverting reality TV show, the guiltiest of guilty pleasures. Not as diverting, funny or charming as Anna Faris though. She’s a superbabe bunny-and-a-half.

The Women (Two Stars)
U.S.; Diane English, 2008 (New Line)

Makeovers aren’t always an improvement. George Cukor‘s classic 1939 movie of Clare Boothe Luce‘s all-female comedy The Women is an often delightful Hollywood-Broadway period piece that still can kill you. But the new version -- ultra- glossy, contemporized and more politically correct though it may be -- eventually doesn’t really work. The original was one of those all-star MGM glamour machines (starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine and Paulette Goddard), summoning up a world of luscious Depression-era wealth and crazy romance, filled with beautiful or humorous-looking people saying witty or outrageous things. Couldn’t we use another like that?

We could. But Diane English’s contemporary remake -- which tries to copy the magic and graft onto it the manners, styles and mores (and, in some cases, social-political clichés) of today --misses the mark, despite a pretty nifty all-star cast of its own: Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett Smith, Debra Messing, Bette Midler and Candice Bergen, joined by scads of others. The new ensemble has beauty, grace, style and humor -- but something doesn’t click.

Is it because the famously conservative Boothe Luce and the more liberal English (creator-producer of Bergen‘s Murphy Brown) are basically an ill-fitting match? Probably. Boothe Luce was one of the leading Republicans of her day and The Women is basically a conservative text, whatever the politics of Cukor‘s writers. (His MGM adaptors included Anita Loos, Jane Murfin and, uncredited, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Donald Ogden Stewart.) English’s Murphy Brown, by contrast, was the major feminist TV show if the 90s. Superficially, there’s a rapprochement. English keeps the basic story line of The Women -- in which society wife Mary Haines (played in 1939 by MGM queen Shearer, now by Ryan), finds that her husband Stephen is cheating with gold-digging department store perfume seller Crystal Allen (then Crawford, now Mendes). Mary, unwisely, gives in to temper and divorce but ultimately, with a little help from her friends, including Joan Fontaine, Paulette Goddard, Mary Boland, Marjorie Main and the flip-flopping Rosalind Russell (whose role as super-catty Sylvie Fowler is taken by Bening), turns the tables.

English seems to me way too nice to all her ladies -- at last for the good of comedy and satire --lightening up even on the ones the original writer trashed. Boothe Luce, who married Henry Luce and kept him, enjoyed dishing it out to her fellow dames. English wants Mary to have it all. But incredibly she wants that also for devious Sylvia who (as played by Russell in her star-making role) was the most two-faced character in a play full of two-faced women. The movie could use some more of them.

Death Race (Two Stars)
U.S.; Paul W. S. Anderson, 2008 (Universal)

Death Race -- with Jason Statham as an unjustly imprisoned racer trapped in a deadly “reality show” car race -- is an almost monotonously exciting action movie. Like too many modern movie thrill-spectacles; it puts you through the wringer but leaves you with little afterwards. It’s so fast and slick and grimily violent, so empty of human content or humor, that it almost puts you to sleep: a modern crash-athon that’s a remake of the Roger Corman-produced 1975 cult classic Death Race 2000, directed by the genial Paul Bartel), this new one makes you long for the good old days when you could make a movie for a million or slightly under -- and when that movie was as likely to have the content of a The Last Picture Show or a Five Easy Pieces as an Easy Rider.

Like many movie-loving ‘60s survivors, I have a soft spot for Corman, the man who made Bloody Mama and many others -- an honest-to-Vincent Price drive-in movie auteur who directed films like Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Wild Angels, who was once described as “The Orson Welles of Z Pictures” and whose bulging IMDB filmography includes 55 films as helmer and 385 as producer -- including the current Death Race (where he‘s an executive producer).

Death Race is a remake of Corman‘s likeably cheesy 1975 Death Race 2000, directed by the genial B-guy Paul Bartel (Eating Raoul) from an Ib Melchior-Robert Thom-Charles Griffith script, with David Carradine and the pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone as dueling drivers Frankenstein and Machine Gun Joe. In the new Death Race, written and directed by Paul Anderson (Alien vs. Predator), those two roles are taken by Statham and Tyrese Gibson (Four Brothers). But the names -- and the idea of a murderous road race conceived for a bloodthirsty future audience -- are the main legacy from the first movie, which was a cheerfully blowzy satire as well as an action movie, somewhat campily directed by Bartel, about media violence and car culture. This one is more expensive, more somber and bloodier, jettisoning most of the humor, settling instead for a grim, grinding set of car races staged inside a prison for a sadistic, wildly popular reality TV show, sanctioned by opportunistic warden Hennessey (Joan Allen). The combatants include Statham, as the screwed-over Jensen Ames, falsely convicted of his wife’s murder, now masquerading at Hennessey’s behest as the legendary driver Frankenstein, and Gibson as his main rival. Among the other drivers: the killer who murdered Jensen’s wife and framed him for the slaying.

When Corman and Bartel made the first Death Race, it was part of a whole ’70s series of cross country car chase or race films, ranging all the way from lyrical naturalistic sagas like Two Lane Blacktop, to surreal or comic concoctions like Vanishing Point or The Gumball Rally, to expensive trash like The Cannonball Run. Death Race 2000 was both surreal and comic: the drivers got points for hitting pedestrians and Bartel sent up machismo. This Death Race wallows in it, salting in lots of macho encounters between Jensen and Joe, Jensen and hard-bitten mentor Coach (Ian McShane, on a holiday) and even Jensen and Hennessey. There’s a sex interest: Natalie Martinez as Jensen‘s navigator, and there’s a sort of surprise ending that doesn’t quite work. Death Race, which was shot on a real location, Montreal’s Terminal Island, has a lot of visual smack and pow. But too much of the time, that’s about all it has. Corman used to do it cheaper, better. Remember?

Read Michael Wilmington's Theatrical Reviews of the Week: The Wrestler, Seven Pounds, Yes Man, Frost/Nixon, Amarcord, and Moscow, Belgium

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- Michael Wilmington
December 19, 2008

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