What Do The Critics Say?

"Anderson serves up an unashamedly guilty pleasure that hits every note, particularly when the racing starts. There’s still an over-excitable child in most of us who delights in seeing hot lead slamming into cars, trucks crashing into walls and things blowing up loudly. And with this amount of guns, girls and brmm brmms, that inner child’s going to be very happy indeed." David Edwards DAILY MIRROR UK "The action comes fast and furious once the race finally begins, There’s a bit of a build up to it all as Anderson takes most of the first act to set the stage and put events into motion, but once we get to the action, Death Race doesn’t let up. While the film is loud and crass and over-the-top, that’s all it ever aspired to be. Death Race is a big dumb action flick and it wears that title like a badge of honor." Mike Bracken MIKE BRACKEN'S HORROR FILMS "The film, directed with a skittish bluntness by Paul W.S. Anderson, knows what it wants to be: straight-ahead violent, with just a fraction of the satire associated with the original. Just sly enough to transform a predictable experience into something close to gripping. "Death Race" shows unexpected depth." Donald Munro FRESNO BEE "Crude, rude, testosterone-clotted, meat-headed fun, mind, but its loud and proud lack of pretension is a relief compared to the pseudo-profundity of many blockbusters. Imagine the surprise to find Death Race the outrageously enjoyable, unashamedly tricked-out ride it largely is." Leigh Singer CHANNEL 4 FILM "The film flirts with social commentary, but it’s more interested in slow-motion shots of Death Race’s beautiful co-stars, like Natalie Martinez. No complaints here. The rest of this Death Race 2000 update purees metal-crunching action, awful dialogue and hokey supporting players with nicknames like Coach (Ian McShane, slumming and proud of it) and Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson).Death Race drips with cheese, and it's insanely proud of it." Christian Toto WASHINGTON TIMES "The movie gets its own Mad Max mojo working, but there's no real attempt at social commentary here: these churls just want to have fun. Death Race makes no pretense of being anything but what it is: a boom-pow-splat thrill ride. And as that, it works, quite well actually. It's got just enough smarts to keep it from sinking under the weight of its own cheesiness." Tom Maurstad GUIDE LIVE

"Offers exactly what action film fans would expect: squealing tires, blazing guns and spectacular crashes. Serviceable storytelling and dialogue that won't make you cover your eyes and shake your head are pleasant surprises. The road to victory in "Death Race" is covered with steel and fire and blood, and in this fierce action flick, there is plenty of destruction, mutilation and mayhem." Stanley A. Miller II MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL "While steel-plated cars bristling with firepower are guaranteed to get adolescent hearts stirring, the movie offers myriad pleasures for adults." Jason Heck KANSAS CITY STAR "A balls to the wall tank-ful of amiable idiocy, fast-paced enough to keep anyone's eye on the road." Anton Bitel LITTLE WHITE LIES "Banish all memories of the original and you’ll find this a slick throwback in the Doomsday mould. Tearing across the screen with all guns blazing, it’s disposable, enjoyable trash." Neil Smith TOTAL FILM "Paul W. S. Anderson’s remake of the trash-pot classic, Death Race, will have Top Gear presenters dribbling over their gear sticks. This sci-fi fantasy about crazy Mad Max races in a high security prison is 8,000 horsepower of pure auto-erotic carnage." James Christopher TIMES UK "For all its brutal predictability, the crash effects are excellent, the editing is hypnotic, the story gets conviction off the performances of Statham and Allen and anyone looking for a crunchathon has definitely come to the right place." William Arnold SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER "It’s nothing more than an enjoyable, ridiculously macho B-movie romp, but it’s Anderson’s best movie since the underrated Event Horizon. Perhaps, at long last, he’s starting to find his: yep, top gear. It’s in the race sequences that Anderson shows why he was willing to wait so long to make the movie. The adherence to practical stunts results in some impressive chases, punctuated by gunfire, fireballs, rolls and spectacular collisions." Chris Hewitt EMPIRE MAGAZINE UK

The Inside Story It is not surprising that British filmmaking partners Paul W.S. Anderson and Jeremy Bolt were fans of executive producer Roger Corman’s "Death Race 2000" which starred David Carradine as Frankenstein and, a young Sylvester Stallone as Machine Gun Joe Viterbo. Considering the duo first gained notoriety for "Shopping" (1994), a dark tale about joyriding youth set in the near future (starring Jude Law and Sean Bean), it seems only natural the world created by producer Corman and director Paul Bartel ("Cannonball!" & "The Long Shot") in 1975 would inspire their choices. Anderson recalls his memories of the original: "I was a big fan of the Corman movie. I saw it on video when I was still living in England as a teenager. It was the movie your parents didn’t want you to see, because it was just packed with senseless violence and unmotivated nudity. So, of course, I just loved it." At a screening for "Shopping" at the 7th Annual Tokyo International Film Festival, producer Bolt and Anderson first met 1997 Golden Eddie Filmmaker of the Year Roger Corman ("House of Usher" & "The Suicide Club") and discussed the idea of reworking "Death Race 2000" for a new audience. At the time, Anderson and Bolt were about to make "Event Horizon" for Paramount, the studio where they first met Paula Wagner and Tom Cruise. The production partners had just launched C/W Productions and expressed interest in developing the project. "I met with Paula at the Dorchester Hotel in London, and she thought it was a fantastic idea. They came aboard, optioned the material under their deal with Paramount and started to develop it. At that point, the idea was a movie similar in spirit to Roger’s film. In other words, it was slightly satirical," Bolt recalls. More than a decade would pass before the project would finally gel. Taking their cue from society’s current obsession with reality television, Anderson and the producers decided to set the film in a dystopian near future. There, they would incorporate the most extreme of reality TV and turn the drivers into prisoners fighting a gladiatorial battle. "It’s a slightly rougher world than we live in now, but still very much recognizable. The explosion in crime rates and the fact that reality television is big have led to the Death Race. It’s the ultimate in reality television: nine racers who race to the death on this sealed course. They’re the gladiators of our time, and the racetrack is their coliseum," Anderson offered. While this action-thriller is quite different from Corman’s classic, one thing would not change. The fans are just as zealous in their passion for favorite drivers to massacre competitors. The more blood shed, the happier these Romans. When casting "Death Race", the filmmakers looked for performers who embodied the gritty realism of the world Anderson imagined. After meeting him, the director felt British actor Jason Statham ("The Bank Job") was his Jensen Ames. "The idea was to fashion a very blue-collar hero," says 2005 Golden Reel Award winner Anderson ("Resident Evil: Apocalypse"). "That’s why I thought Jason was a perfect choice to play Jensen, a man who’s got a hard-luck story." Through Ames, Anderson sets up the future. In the violent, impoverished world, there is little hope, but Ames has found a reason to live. "He’s working in a crumbling, rust-belt town as a steel worker. The steelworks is closing down, and he’s just lost his job," says Anderson. "This is a tough guy who’s been to prison before and would’ve gone back if it weren’t for the fact that he’s found this woman who loves him. They’ve had a child together, and she’s his second chance at life." "Paul was a wealth of information about this story," Statham recalls. And the script? "I thought the script was emotional, fun, dark, violent and sexy." Statham, a self-professed 'massive car geek', especially liked the sketches of the cars Anderson showed him, particularly those of the Mustang that he’d be driving as Hennessey’s 'Frankenstein'. "We’ve seen cars with nitrous oxide systems before, but I’ve never seen anything like what Paul does in this movie," Statham said. For the warden who forces Ames to become her star driver and the coach who trains him, the producers didn’t want stock character actors. They looked to dramatic performers such as Joan Allen ("The Contender" & "The Upside of Anger") and Ian McShane ("Shrek the Third" & "Kung Fu Panda") to add credibility. "You’re not used to seeing Joan Allen in a movie like this," Bolt says with a laugh. "It was awesome to hear her swearing like a trooper, because I associated her with roles like a female president or a headmistress." Allen, the 1988 Tony Best Actress Award (Play) winner for her Broadway debut in Lanford Wilson's "Burn This", was asked to play Warden Claire Hennessey, a well-tailored jailer who has all the power on Terminal Island. "It was a very cool script, and I was really taken with the characters," Allen recalls. "I thought the cars were amazing and the concept was exciting. It reminded me of Road Warrior and Blade Runner in look and feel." Allen recalls thinking at the time: "Wow, this could be really incredibly cool." She looked forward to taking on a character like no one she’d played before: an extremely pious sociopath. "Hennessey is an interesting study of somebody who gets wrapped up in the media and numbers and forgets human lives are at stake," Allen notes. "My character only sees Death Race as an incredibly popular show that people really want to watch. She takes pride in that and gets kickbacks from it." 2005 Golden Globe winner Ian McShane ("Deadwood"), most recently seen on Broadway in Daniel Sullivan’s revival of Harold Pinter’s "The Homecoming", was interested in being a part of a film he describes as "like NASCAR to the death, inside prison. Everybody tunes in to watch convicts kill themselves in their cars and blast the crap out of each other around this racetrack." For his part, McShane believes, "Coach is one of the good guys; an honest man who’s been in prison for so long that he’s adapted and made it his home. As the chief mechanic, he knows all the cars, but he mainly works on Frankenstein’s Mustang." American Music Awards 2000 Favorite New R&B/Soul Artist winner Tyrese Gibson ("Four Brothers" & "Transformers") knew playing the ruthless murderer Machine Gun Joe would be a challenge. "Machine Gun Joe is evil," says Gibson. "He’s an inmate, a leader and a killer. This role was so dark. It was really hard for me to come on set and be dark and then, between takes, get back to being my normal self: fun, laughing, cracking jokes." Natalie Martinez star of TV'S "Fashion House" & "Saints & Sinners", was cast as the sexy and tough Case, who is shipped in from the women’s jail (as are almost all navigators). Her job, as we are led to believe, is to help Frankenstein to victory in the "Death Race". But Case has got a couple of sneaky moves of her own. "She’s in jail, and the warden’s waving freedom around," the Cuban-American actress and model Martinez explained. "Case is very easily manipulated to do anything anybody wants." Martinez, however, did not have to be coerced to hang tough. During production, the performer literally threw herself into her role, even hanging out of the window of the moving Monster during gunfire takes. While Anderson, the producers and 1998 Gemini Award winning production designer Paul Denham Austerberry wanted to create a decaying world that reached slightly into the future, there were aspects that came into focus only when they settled on location. The solution was found in Montreal, which offered a prime space for Terminal Island. That site was the now defunct Alstom train yards in the Pointe St, Charles district. The yards served as primary exterior shooting locations and offered a grimy, industrial warehouse in which to house production. "The locations look almost like they’ve been built for the movie, but they were found; they give Death Race great production value," Anderson ("AVP: Alien vs. Predator") notes. "The movie wasn’t written for these locations, so I had to go back and rewrite the script to tailor them to these fantastic places we found." The team envisioned the death-trap racetrack to run between the disused warehouses in Alstom. "The big straightway with the gantry cranes on either side was a fantastic race straightway," says Austerberry ("Assault On Precinct 13"). "It looked, at night especially, like you were on some other planet. As soon as we saw it, we knew we had to make it work. The key was trying to create a full racecourse." Another piece of the race track was found in the Bleeker Tunnel, a wide space that gave new depth to the Death Race. When he tied together visuals of the silos in the Old Port and the straightway in Alstom, Anderson had his behemoth racetrack. For exterior shots of the Terminal Island prison facility, the team lensed at an abandoned, turn of the century prison, St. Vincent de Paul. Though closed more than a decade ago, the massive exteriors and interior courtyards were exactly what was needed for the penitentiary. In fact, the jail reminded many in the production of the look in Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1973 seminal prison film "Papillon", which starred the late Steve McQueen as Henri 'Papillon' Charriere . Tyrese Gibson comments that locations were so realistic it felt as if they were in jail. "No acting was required," he says. "You just had to look around, see the big, old walls and all the barbed wire to focus on what you were there to do." The spectacular opening steel mill shots, where we first are introduced to Ames, were filmed in an actual steel mill, to add to the gritty reality. Permission from the mill, allowed the team to shoot documentary-style in the working factory, with Statham placed among the real workers while enormous cauldrons full of molten steel were poured in the background. "I think they knew it was our last pour of the day, and they filled that sucker up," Statham ("Mean Machine" & "Cellular") recalls. "Literally, as they called 'Action', I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck start to disintegrate. I swore a couple of times in the back of my brain and just kept a stoic face as I walked towards the camera." When it came to the Death Race cars, the team went for insane modifications of expected models. "We had to pick cars you could easily recognize in the fray of the race," says Austerberry. We also wanted cars that would appeal to a broad range of ages. The actors loved their respective rides, complete with napalm, nitrous-oxide (NOS) tanks and ejector seats. Jensen Ames drives a tricked-out 2006 Ford Mustang GT known as 'The Monster'. Machine Gun Joe drives a weaponized, armor-plated 2004 Dodge Ram 1500 Quad Cab 4WD. Neo-Nazi Pachenko drives a 1966 Buick Riviera chop top, lovingly known as the 'Death Machine'. the other features cars are: 14K’s 1978 Porsche 911, outfitted with four hellfire missiles on the roof and four mini-rocket clusters on the hood; Travis Colt’s 1989 XJS Jaguar V12 with two M2s (.50 cal.) on the hood front; Grimm’s 300 monster car, a 2006 Chrysler 300C with three MAG 58s (.308 calibre), rocket-tube machine guns on the hood front and hellfire missiles on the back. It took approximately eight weeks of working through concepts before the team began assembling and set up in a Montreal fabrication shop. "We had four draftsmen and two concept artists working in Toronto, then we came to Montreal. There was a huge team 50 crew members," Austerberry says. Montreal Images ©2008 Declan McCullagh Photography All Rights Reserved Synopsis

The world’s hunger for extreme sports and reality competitions has grown into reality TV bloodlust. Now, the most extreme racing competition has emerged and its contestants are murderous prisoners. Tricked-out cars, caged thugs and smoking-hot navigators combine to create a juggernaut series with bigger ratings than the Super Bowl. The rules of the Death Race are simple: Win five events, and you’re set free. Lose and you’re road kill splashed across the Internet. Three-time speedway champion Jensen Ames, an ex-con framed for a gruesome murder has just two months left on his sentence. Forced to don the mask of the mythical driver Frankenstein, a Death Race crowd favorite who seems impossible to kill, Ames is given an easy choice by Terminal Island’s ruthless Warden Hennessey: enter the insane three-day race or never see his little girl again. He chooses to race. He'll drive a monster Mustang V8 Fastback outfitted with 2 mounted mini-guns, flamethrowers and napalm. All he has to so is survive.

The Verdict "Don't be fooled into thinking that the original actioner "Death Race 2000" was any great shakes by cinematic standards. What Paul Bartel's 1975 action film featured was an outrageous storyline about a three stage Transcontinental Road Race where competitors raced for points gained at timed checkpoints and, by the number fatalities they racked up along the way. The film quickly gained cult status. With the passage of time, memories of "Death Race 2000" have dimmed significantly. If you are old enough to have seen the original, you will understand why it would take a very brave studio indeed, to remake it with the original storyline. Forunately, many of the present crop of cinemagoers will be blissfully unaware of the existence of "Death Race 2000". Until now, that is! Thanks to director/writer Paul W S Anderson, a whole new generation of cinemagoers will re-discover the "Death Race". Now it's run over three days. The cars are still equipped with plenty of armour and massive fire-power. The race track is set in a penitentiary named Terminal Island. It's kill or be killed. Each driver has a navigator (with the exception of one); a hot babe shipped in from the womens penitentiary. The prize? Whoever wins, gains their freedom. The good news is, this is a whole lot better than you'd expect. The SFX and CGI work is outstanding, in fact they're good enough to be nominated in the 2008 Academy ® Awards category for Best Visual Effects. The cars are brutish. Begrudgingly, you'll probably grow to like the characters played by Jason Statham and Tyrese Gibson. It's pure escapism. The production team behind "Death Race" just want us to have fun, and in the end we do. There's no fancy dialogue, these are criminals after all. It's one hell of a ride. Bone jarring, brutal, edge of your seat, pedal to the metal, adrenaline charged racing. Don't take it seriously. Just go along for the ride and you'll have a one heck of a time. 3 1/2 STARS." Crew Bytes "DEATH RACE" was .......
directed by Paul W S Anderson ["Shopping", "Event Horizon" and "Soldier"]; screenplay by Paul W S Anderson ["Shopping", and "Resident Evil: Extinction"]; art direction by Nigel Churcher ["Resident Evil: Apocalypse", "Assault on Precinct 13" and "Take the Lead"]; costume design by Gregory Mah ["North of Pittsburgh", "North of Pittsburgh" and "Final Destination 3"]; production design by Paul Denham Austerberry ["Exit Wounds", "The Tuxedo" and "Take the Lead"]; edited by Niven Howie ["The Filth and the Fury", "Dawn Of The Dead" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"]; director of photography Scott Kevan ["Cabin Fever", "Deepwater" and "Borderland"]; original music by Paul Haslinger ["Blue Crush", "Crank" and "Prom Night"]. Who's Who

Jason Statham Joan Allen Ian McShane Tyrese Gibson Natalie Martinez Max Ryan Jacob Vargas Jason Clarke Frederick Koehler Justin Mader Robert LaSardo Robin Shou Benz Antoine Danny Blanco Hall Christian Paul Janaya Stephens John Fallon Anna-Marie Frances Lea Dan Jeannotte Marcello Bezina Jere Gillis David Carradine

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

Jensen Ames Hennessey Coach Machine Gun Joe Mason Elizabeth Case Pachenko Gunner Ulrich Lists Travis Colt Grimm 14K Joe's Navigator #1 Joe's Navigator #2 Joe's Navigator #3 Suzy Neo Nazi Nasty Teller Hennessey Tech Policeman #1 Policeman #2 Voice of Frankenstein

Run Time 105 minutes Rated MA15+ [AUST] Copyright ©2008 - Universal Pictures - All Rights Reserved ©2008 All Rights Reserved The Movie Pages - Protected by Australian, International, Copyright & Trademark Laws.