Death Race

Saw Death Race, a remake of the original 1970s Death Race 2000. It is similarly set in the near future where racers horribly race each other to the death with weaponized cars. It retains the original's distrust of establishment and disgust at the spectacle, but it also retains the original's schizophrenia about itself. Is it the very grotesque spectacle that it's condemning, or is it ironically above all of that and is it in fact high satire. Well, high satire it is not (at least so far as I can tell.) It's too muddy and unclear to be definitely allegorical. It is aware of its own ridiculousness and has many moments that flirt with punchy commentary. For example, the protagonist is an ex-miner who is stiffed on his last paycheck by his faceless, scumbag employers. The collective group of miners start shouting and the cops come in and there's a mini-riot and it all feels very Kent State, very Tea Party/Occupy Wallstreet. I feel like something's about to make a point... but then nothing does.

He just goes home after that and is framed by a masked man for the murder of his wife (this lets him be sexily windowed by the way... Ladies.) I think the exploitation of the miners is supposed to sort of set up this general feeling of paranoia and make the more personal exploitation of the protagonist more hard-hitting, but it all feels so generic. On the one hand it's an interesting tie between the social and the personal, but how is it different from an action movie motivating the protagonist with the kidnap of his daughter? The whole thing is very fun, mind you. It's not boring, just not novel. Anyway, In prison there's more little gestures at relevance, with the deadly female warden derisively hissing at the hero "what would you do with your freedom?" and the reality-TV-style Death Race ads and so on. There's something maybe-clever going on with the racers' pro-wrestler-style personae and rivalries, but all of this is overshadowed by the spectacular video-game-like titular Death Race.

The death race is fun to watch, in a dumb loud sort of way. A lot happens but nothing really matters. People die of course, but you're never really surprised by who does die. Non-spoiler alert: the hero lives for quite a while. It's kind of fun to watch the heroes defeat the smug powers-that-be, but it kind of grated on me as a whole. The obsession with cars, guns and posturing is a siren song I don't respond to. I am probably missing the point of this film. I suspect there's something going on under the hood but I'm so turned off by the trappings of the film that I'm not going to investigate. A puzzling film which I, for reasons of cognitive dissonance reduction, condemn as a mess.