The remake Roger Ebert hated even more than the original: “Not a brand that guarantees quality”
We’re living in a time where ideas for new films seem to be getting increasingly less original. With so many movies already in existence, there is naturally a smaller pool of truly original ideas up for grabs, but does that mean directors need to repeatedly remake movies or directly take from pre-existing films? The market is saturated by remakes, sequels, prequels, and re-interpretations of previously released movies, and for Roger Ebert, there was one that emerged in the 2000s that he simply couldn’t stand.
In fact, he found the 2008 version more offensive than the original, leaving him to question why the movie had even been made. Directed by Paul W S Anderson, Death Race wasn’t exactly a critical hit, but it managed to gross $76 million, much to Ebert’s despair. The first warning sign was that it was made by Anderson, who has a history of butchering everything he touches, typically choosing to adapt video games into movies, like the Resident Evil franchise.
For Death Race, he looked back to Death Race 2000, released in 1975 and directed by Paul Bartel, which featured David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone and has since become somewhat of a cult classic. It was produced by the iconic indie film titan Roger Corman and featured excessive violence, something that Ebert couldn’t stand. “This is a film about a futuristic cross‑country race in which the winner is determined, not merely by his speed, but also by the number of pedestrians he kills,” he tells us in his review.
He explains how the audience loved the amount of sheer violence, writing, “Well, folks, the theater was up for grabs. The audience was at least half small children, and they loved it. They’d never seen anything so funny, I guess, and I was torn between walking out immediately and staying to witness a spectacle more dismaying than anything on the screen: the way small children were digging gratuitous bloodshed.”
While Ebert’s criticisms are certainly valid, the dystopian movie can also be interpreted as a rather brutal look at the normalisation of violence and government exploitation, exploring similar themes to more popular movies that would come decades later like Battle Royale or The Hunger Games.
Despite Ebert’s hatred of the film, he was seated for Death Race 2000 over 30 years later, which he awarded just half a star. He starts his review brutally: “Hitchcock said a movie should play the audience like a piano. Death Race played me like a drum. It is an assault on all the senses, including common. Walking out, I had the impression I had just seen the video game and was still waiting for the movie.”
The critic simply couldn’t understand why anyone needed to take inspiration from the first movie to make another, finishing his article with two damning sentences: “Let us conclude that Death Race is not a brand that guarantees quality. That it will no doubt do great at the box office is yet another sign of the decline of the national fanboy mentality.”
