Death Race 3: Inferno, director Roel Reine's follow-up to his Death Race 2, itself a prequel to Paul W.S. Anderson's Death Race (2008), picks up where the previous movie ended and ends where the original begins. Carl Lucas (Luke Goss) has been “rebuilt” after his apparent death in a fiery crash, transformed into the masked driver Frankenstein, the star of a deadly sport played by condemned prisoners in the privatized prisons of businessman Weyland (Ving Rhames).
As the new movie starts, Weyland's corporation suffers a hostile take-over by Niles York (Dougray Scott), who has plans to franchise Death Race at multiple locations around the world. The first off-shoot is scheduled for South Africa, and Lucas and his crew are shipped overseas for a grueling three-day contest in the desert.
Inferno gains what originality it has from the shift in location, taking advantage of the desert landscape as well as African townships which give it visual echoes of the social upheavals which accompanied the end of the apartheid regime. The sketched in character conflicts involve, on the one side, the crew's resentment of Lucas's having kept his survival a secret (something he had to do to protect them) and on the other side, York's increasing interference in the race which threatens the success of the franchise as he becomes too personally involved.
Anderson's original film was a reworking of Paul Bartel's 1975 satirical action-comedy Death Race 2000 as a grim dystopian commentary on current social trends (the privatization and monetizing of the U.S. penal system, the rise of increasingly violent “sports” like MMA, the Internet's insatiable consumption of graphic content). It was one of the best and most visceral action films of the decade, its impact deriving from the director's decision to go with real vehicles and stunts rather than CG, and his ability to stage, shoot and edit the action in such a way that no matter how chaotic it got, the viewer could always tell what was happening and what the relationships were between the various drivers.
While Reine continues this non-CG approach, however, his editors chop the action up into such fragments that the cutting defeats the purpose – what we get is a visual frenzy which obscures rather than reveals what's going on. On his enthusiastic commentary track on the disk, Reine asserts that he prefers to cover action in extended shots which clearly display the stunts being performed, implying that this slice-and-dice approach represents what he and his producers believe is what audiences want. But despite this, Reine isn't just a direct-to-video hack: he gets decent performances from his cast and, as his own cameraman, he has an excellent eye for dynamic imagery. In fact, it's the look of the movie which is most significant as it illustrates dramatically what is now possible with the latest digital cameras.
.jpg?t=20130517094513)
Article comments
1 - jim
Did you see the shot at the end when the girl sat down...whoo whoo!!!