(This review may contain spoilers).
The concept behind this movie was a really intriguing one. A particular aspect that I liked was the interspersing of advertisements within the course of the movie.
Car racing is a fairly big thing, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to see it used for criminals to race for freedom. It was interesting to see, in the first scene, how society seemed to have broken down and not just in the way that prisoners were treated. It definitely came across as a dystopian world.
I found Jason Statham’s character, Jensen Ames, to be quite an intriguing one. Although he had the violence I’ve noticed seems to be involved in most of this particular actor’s characters, I felt that he came across as a character with a realistic background and I spent a lot of the film really empathising with him.
I would have liked to see if the Death Races were an international thing, or just concentrated to one area. I did like Jensen’s interactions with the other characters. Although I could see something romantic potentially growing between him and Case, I was glad to see that a romance didn’t become a main focus, since I felt it would have detracted from what had happened to Jensen.
I did find it interesting to see the other racers and I would have liked to see a bit more of their histories and how they landed in the jail.
I think the primary audience for this movie was men, considering the violence, car racing, lots of women just to be ‘navigators’… but I still quite enjoyed this. There was a particularly good cast involved here and some of the aspects of the races reminded me of video games I used to play. I also felt that the special effects were neat – and I especially liked the ending.
I haven’t seen the sequels to this and I probably won’t. I liked this film… but I suspect the sequels will be quite similar plot-and-character-wise.
