Continuing the theme of jumping straight into madness out of nowhere and staying on the same busy note for a long time, as was the start of the second hour last time round, this movie does much the same thing but gets going within the first 15 minutes. It continues on from where the last one left off, with some time skipped between them, and has much the same cast as the last one, including Luke, Katrina, Goldberg, Lists, K14 and Weyland (Ving Rhames), and of course Luke Goss.
From extremely choppy camerawork during combat scenes, to seemingly zero script power, this movie is Barely Watchable — that’s a couple of levels even further below Death Race 2 — and it’s only watchable if you’re really desperate and only due to the So-So cast and Decent genre. Personally, I fast-forwarded through most of the start, watching only the better bits, then skimmed past the rest and decided to give it a miss because I’ve got better things to do.
I also skimmed through Death Race 4 and it looked even worse — no wonder Luke Goss didn’t even care to come back for that one! Oh how far has this saga has descended since Statham’s cool original!
This is more of a remake than a sequel. Nothing really continues from the original. It’s not an identical copy, but some particular scenes are pretty much identical (with inferior execution of course).
As expected by the promotional material and the level of the lead cast members, this movie has a considerably cheaper vibe than the original — especially on the cinematography front — but surprisingly the acting is pretty good and the movie does very well at keeping the pace going fast enough to sustain an entertaining vibe. Credit to Luke Goss who performs out of his skin, backed by supporting cast members like Sean Bean, Ving Rhames and Danny Trejo who action fans will be familiar with from other movies and are all about as big & strong in action movie stardom as Luke Goss, if not bigger, so he’s done well to score them in his supporting cast and the producers have done poorly in not making him also just a supporting cast member for someone markedly stronger — maybe they had Statham in mind for Goss’s role here until Statham turned it down.
There are a couple of minor returning characters from the original, although one of them was killed last time round: 14K (meant to be dead) and the nerdy fat white guy who worked in Statham’s car crew.
The cheapness of this movie is telling throughout, but the pace does well to make it tolerable, however when it gets to around an hour in, when the prisoners get acquainted with their vehicles and begin racing and killing each other all in one fast paced long monotonous scene, the cheap & nasty level of this movie really peaks. The original never would have overwhelmed us like that, which only resulted in a kind of boredom due to constant hollow action after a shocking burst of pace. The original would have been much more conscious of momentum and would have considered the execution of this one comically bad. From the start of the second hour it becomes tempting to fast forward through a lot of the hollow action. And although there are a couple of in between scenes and minor plot developments, it pretty much doesn’t let up with the shallow monotonous racing drama from the start of the second hour until the end. The first hour was the good part of the movie, the second is wildly all over the place and has entirely lost focus.
It’s not until the last quarter hour when we learn that this is actually a prequel to the original, since Luke Goss gets burnt to a crisp and becomes the original Frankenstein racer who was already 4 wins in at the start of the original movie. From here, the last 10 minutes are actually pretty good. It’s just a shame we had to sit through (or skip) the previous half an hour — the main course of the movie.
All things considered, I rate this movie So-So — that’s around a couple levels below average, and about 4 clean levels below the original. But it’s not worthless — it’s mostly watchable, and mostly mildly entertaining if you’re terribly bored and have not seen it before or in a long time at least.
This movie gets off to a great start, with a fun Mission Impossible style action scene that was probably quite cutting-edge for its day. It then proceeds to be quite captivating with easy viewing for the first third of the movie, largely thanks to the overwhelming majority of screentime being occupied by interactions between the very excellent Sean Connery and the alright Catherine Zeta-Jones. This was a cutting-edge thriller in its day, with plenty of action and a bit of mystery, but you could put Sean and Catherine in a movie of any genre and they’d probably make it work remarkably well.
The action gets a bit tense yet drowsy near the middle, as they’re trying to build suspense with the help of irritating white-noise sound effects. Fortunately the script soon livens up again, and the story gets increasingly spicy. After a while though, it gets a bit slow and drama-oriented again, and this is generally the trend of the remainder of the movie – intermittently strong & weak with intermittent action & drama scenes.
The action gets quite intense towards the end, then gets clever at the very end, rounding off a movie that would have probably been Below Average with random actors but turned out to be Above Average thanks to Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Ving Rhames (the black hacker from Mission Impossible) also adds a lot of value to this movie, especially near the end. He initially plays Sean Connery’s supplier of gadgets, but eventually turns out to be an FBI agent.
Will Patton also does alright, as the boss of Catherine’s character early on in the movie, and one of the guys trying to catch her in the end.
This is a movie about a prisoner played by Wesley Snipes, locked up for life after being an undefeated California state boxing champion, now a 10 year reigning prison champ, having an organised fight inside prison with the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, recently given a short sentence, played by Ving Rhames (the hacker from Mission Impossible). That’s it, two guys meet in prison and arrange to fight. That’s as far as the plot goes. The actual fight scene at the end is quite boring and dragged out for a good 20 minutes. If not for the very respectable cast members, this movie would not be worth watching, but Wesley is his usual self and mildly entertaining in this poor excuse for an action movie. Ving Rhames is average in his role. We’re also treated by a supporting role from Peter Falk (of Columbo) who does a good job, as well as Fisher Stevens (the bad guy from Hackers) who ain’t bad, and Michael Rooker (leader of the Ravager pirates who adopted Peter Quill in the Guardians Of The Galaxy trilogy) who is pretty good here. So we’ve got a decent cast, working with a barely existent script. Sack the writer and the director. Give this team something serious to work on.
Action Hero Movies