Also Opening This Weekend: ‘Death Race’
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
An adrenalized mishmash of “Total Recall,” “Escape From New York,” and “Herbie Fully Loaded,” Paul W.S. Anderson’s “Death Race” takes place in a not-so-distant future in which overcrowded prisons have reached a breaking point and prisoners have become pawns in the nation’s most popular televised sport: a car race in which inmates must brutalize and kill one another on the road to victory.
Forced to participate in the race by the corporation that runs the prisons, ex-convict Jensen Ames (Jason Statham), a former Nascar champion, submits to the demands of a ruthless warden (Joan Allen) and dons the mask of the mythical driver Frankenstein rather than going back to jail for the rest of his life.
