death race

This weekend's DVD rental... was watched last night.

What with the wedding and the hangover, I both didn't have the time and in all honesty really couldn't be arsed to watch my rental DVDs.

And it is DVDs plural - for some odd reason I got a bonus DVD rental the other month. I tried to get them to send it so that it would arrive sensibly, but I made a total mess of it and it turned up after Easter for this last weekend when there was the wedding.

Anyway, what I basically did was watch the first of the DVDs - death race - last night. I didn't get through all the extras, but I watched the actual film.

And it wasn't very good.

The main problem with it was that the story just didn't work. It was clumsy and it didn't hang together properly. But weirdly, it managed to be clumsy, despite wallowing around in what should have been a really clichéd plot.

Part of the problem I think was that because they knew it was a clichéd plot they thought they could skip bits. So, as a really good example, when Jenson's wife is killed and he's framed for the murder, we then skip 6 months into the future.

In other words, we don't get to see him grieving, we don't get the heart-string pulling scenes of his baby being taken away, we don't even get to see the court case or anything. So it's flat. We don't really know why we should care.

Oh, and mentioning the time-slip also brings up the films other major problem - it's full of stuff where you think "Hang on, that doesn't make sense." or "But what about..."

So, in this case him being framed is actually a pretty lousy job. Any kind of forensic investigation or proper detective work would show up all sorts of problems. Which would be fine, if we'd seen that the police were incompetent or corrupt, or that they've gotten rid of trial by jury or whatever. The actual explanation could be anything, but we don't see it, so it just becomes a massive plot hole.

And the film is absolutely riddled with them.

Plus, where it could have made up for this, it also lets itself down.

If it had been chock full of sex and violence then it wouldn't have mattered as much, because it would have been a trashy film that you just enjoy for that. But it isn't - it tries to be a proper film instead, but it just falls short. Don't get me wrong - there's quite a bit of stuff like that, but it's a lot tamer than it could have been.