Director: Paul Wanderson
Cast: Jason Statham, Joan Allen Tyrese Gibson, Natalie Martinez and Max Ryan
The movie focusses on the Terminal Island Prison, which broadcast Death Race to the world via a popular paysite on internet. Death Race is not only a race to the finish line, but a battle pitting car against car. The film begins by showing a race near its end between Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson) and a famous masked driver known as Frankenstein (David Carradine in a cameo appearance), who is accompanied by a female navigator. Frank's defensive systems fail and Joe destroys Frank's car (his navigator ejects), presumably leaving Frankenstein critically wounded or dead.
Jensen Ames (Jason Statham) is framed for his wife's murder on the same day that the steel mill he works at closes; the murderer is actually a masked intruder that points a finger-gun at Ames as he leaves. Ames is sent to prison where he is coerced by the sadistic prison warden, Hennessey (Joan Allen) to become the new driver of Frankenstein's Ford Mustang. She tells Ames that she knows of his baby that was left in foster care, and that prisoners are freed upon winning five Death Races, but since he will take on the mask of the legendary Frankenstein, who had 4 wins at the time of his death, he will only need to win one race. The races are broken apart into three stages: Stage 1 and 2 are races in which the driver must survive, and Stage 3 you must win the race in order for it to add to the count towards freedom.
I really wanted to remake Death Race 2000. I was always fascinated with the original movie. Once you get beyond the nudity and the violence and cars, it always fascinated me. What I thought our movie should be about was the origin of the Death Race; how, in a very real way, could you imagine that happening. Where Roger's movie is an overtly satirical movie, this is tonally different. I wanted to keep the movie focussed on the race. I’m not a big fan of movies set ten years in the future. So I deliberately set the movie in a nameless and slightly timeless American city and I shot it in a series of locations that haven’t changed. I kept it set in environments that I felt would have existed 30 years ago and will exist 30 years into the future, deliberately to give the movie a timeless feel. I deliberately didn’t show the outside world because I thought it made the movie more powerful to let the audience imagine what the outside world was like, as it was also something, which I have explored.