DEATH RACE - Ben Franklin's Third Certainty in Life

DEATH RACE is a film that delivers exactly what you’d expect. If you’ve seen the trailers, you’ve basically seen the film.

SPOILERS PEELING OUT BELOW

It’s a solid genre effort, with some good chase scenes and a lot of creative violence. Unfortunately, it doesn’t provide any surprises. What you expect to occur in the story happens in every single beat – from the frame-up that lands our hero in prison and the Death Race to the double-crosses and the eventual team-up with his chief rival.

While it’s a competent film, a little more imagination could’ve resulted in something we haven’t seen before, something that would take the film out of mediocre territory.

One thing I would’ve done is to delay Jason Statham discovering who set him up until later in the story. The audience knows he’s been set up – clearly he didn’t kill his wife; he’s the good guy. And having him try to find the culprit is good. But it should be more of a struggle, not something so blatantly obvious as the henchman giving the same finger-gun gesture after he kills the wife and in prison. Statham should have a few dead ends before he finds the guy, and then it’s a further revelation that he was sent by the warden (right now, it’s also blatantly obvious the warden sent him; the guy’s a prisoner).

But even for all its predictability, it wasn’t the worst film I’ve seen in a while.