DRIVING THEIR RELATIONSHIP: Consuela (Penelope Cruz) reaches out to David (Ben Kingsley) in Elegy.
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Ice Cube, who has successfully molded his limited thespian abilities into an agreeable screen persona, stars as Curtis Plummer, just one of the many unemployed men in the struggling blue-collar town of Minden, Illinois. With nothing better to do with his time, Curtis reluctantly agrees to look after his withdrawn niece Jasmine (Keke Palmer, building on the promise of Akeelah and the Bee) while her mother (Tasha Smith) works double shifts. As expected, Curtis and Jasmine have nothing in common -- at least until the day he discovers she has a formidable arm when it comes to tossing the pigskin. A former high school football star himself, Curtis then sets about training her for the institution's pathetic team, which hasn't enjoyed a winning season in ages. Jasmine makes the cut and begins to turn their season around, but is she good enough to take the outfit all the way to the Pop Warner Super Bowl in Miami? What do you think?
PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON currently stands as one of the most acclaimed writer-directors in America, having created such films as Boogie Nights, Magnolia and last year's Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood. Therefore, it's unbelievable that he's behind Death Race, a stultifying remake of -- wait, hold on a sec. Oh, right, this is Paul W.S. Anderson, the man behind such titles as Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil and AVP: Alien vs. Predator. Ah, now it makes sense.
Look, there's nothing wrong with producing cinematic trash as long as it delivers, but Death Race, like most of this guy's previous pictures, is about as much fun as having two flat tires on I-77 during rush hour traffic. Yet it's not like Anderson didn't start with a reasonably sturdy foundation: The original film, 1975's Death Race 2000, is trashy fun, a campy Roger Corman satire with David Carradine and a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone as rival drivers in a nationally broadcast sport where the purpose (along with taking out fellow speed racers) is to run over as many people as possible. In typical Corman fashion, this cult item even tried to make some sociopolitical statements amid all the gleefully executed carnage -- one example was its commentary on this country's growing lust for bloodsport, which now seems downright prophetic in this age of reality TV and pay-per-view wrestling extravaganzas.
This new Death Race, on the other hand, is so thematically tired that in a few months, it will be impossible to separate it in the mind from other junky action flicks (including wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin's The Condemned, which sports a near-identical plotline). Here, the hero is Jensen Ames (Jason Statham), a working joe who's falsely accused of murdering his wife (where are Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones when we really need them?) and sent to a maximum-security prison, where the best drivers compete for their freedom in a three-day demolition derby that's televised to over 50 million Americans. On the track, Jensen's chief rival is Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson in Stallone's old role, and let's just say that Sly's two-syllable grunting deserved an Academy Award compared to Gibson's one-syllable utterances). Off the track, his arch-nemesis is the sadistic Warden Hennessey, a steely she-beast described by one inmate as "the biggest bad-ass" in the prison. Hennessey is rather unexpectedly played by Joan Allen, who has earned three Oscar nominations in her career and by my reckoning has deserved at least three more (including a win for her non-nominated work in The Upside of Anger). Coincidentally, Allen turned 52 two days before this film opened; here's assuming this is one birthday present she'd like to return.
The most interesting aspect of this otherwise stupid and obnoxious film? It's set in 2012, when our present Bush-driven economy finally collapses, crime is running too rampant to control, and this country has basically gone to hell. Reading between the lines, does that mean this movie is predicting John McCain (aka the bearer of Bush's third term) will win come November?
ACCORDING TO THE Internet Movie Database, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner has appeared as himself (or a variation thereof) in over 150 movies, TV shows and video productions, including episodes of Laverne & Shirley, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Sex and the City. Presumably, Hefner enjoys lengthier screen time in the new comedy The House Bunny, although personally I don't think he'll ever top his cameo in the Roman Empire segment of Mel Brooks' History of the World: Part I, wherein he sports a toga while brandishing his trademark pipe and explaining to a bevy of beauties that "It's a new concept; I call it the centerfold."
***1/2
DIRECTED BY Isabel Coixet
STARS Ben Kingsley, Penelope Cruz
**
DIRECTED BY Fred Durst
STARS Ice Cube, Keke Palmer
*1/2
DIRECTED BY Paul W.S. Anderson
STARS Jason Statham, Joan Allen
**
DIRECTED BY Fred Wolf
STARS Anna Faris, Colin Hanks
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