Drago's review of the Statham Death Race prompted me to dig up this old review, of my 2014 rewatch of the original "cult" film.
Death Race 2000
I think this is just a bad film. Not as cynically awful as Revenge of the Fallen, or as unwatchable as Jaws 4, but not good.
It's thematically tone deaf, unsure of whether it's a wacky romp, a gory exploitation film, or scary dystopia. The character motivations are obscure, and seem to appear from the demands of the script, rather than any kind of careful development. The female characters are "empowered" in the way that they tended to be in the '70s, i.e. in a fashion that fits a certain male fantasy. At the end of the film, I was unsure whether the death of Junior was in keeping with the main characters' motivations or not, or the overall thrust of the film, given how poorly they'd been developed. It seemed like a throwaway gag.
In lots of ways, the themes did remind me a bit of the cynically bad films we've watched, in that they seemed to have been added from a checklist, with little thought other than their inclusion.
Even given their age, the effects and production are poor. The fake tunnel that persaudes one racer off the road, the speech podium that, when knocked down, looks like a couple of planks and scaffolding poles, Frankenstein can pull his mask off one handed, but it doesn't budge during a fistfight with Joe? I don't mind this stuff usually, but these don't demand suspension of disbelief, so much as the abandoning of the philosophical concept of disbelief entirely.
The musical direction is shoot - a variety of ill chosen pieces that don't fit the action on screen, and aren't coherent enough to come across as a consistent contraposition to the images. Particularly bad is the comic jazz that goes with the Frankenstein/Joe fist fight, which might as well have had Yakketty-Sax underneath it.
Some of the "message" elements are, with hindsight, interesting. The regime's promotion of minority privilege, for example, echoes the trickle down economics ideas of today. The idea of reality TV making up its own stories in defiance of the facts is one we should be familiar with too. But even there, too much is hamfisted and dated to make the film work in that way. One of the French crimes is destroying the telephone system? We've not progressed beyond CRT screens?
The direction is mostly little better than efficient, save for some nice 2nd unit stuff from the driver point of view. In places, it's laughably bad, like the scene where Stallone is allowed to hold the facial expression that went with one of his earlier lines for several beats too long.
For me, this just didn't build up the goodwill, or move at a pace that would let me overlook its faults, and I'm not anxious to see it again.
