Death Race 3: Inferno (2012) [Blu-ray]
Action | Sci-Fi | Thriller

Repentant convict Carl Lucas (Luke Goss) - aka Frankenstein - is a legendary driver in the brutal prison blood sport known as Death Race. Only one victory away from winning freedom, Lucas is plunged into his most vicious competition yet: the first-ever desert Death Race. Through South Africa's infernal Kalahari Desert, Lucas is pitted against ruthless adversaries and powerful forces at work behind the scenes to ensure his defeat. Also starring Danny Trejo and Ving Rhames, Death Race 3: Inferno is an insane, action-packed thrill ride.

Storyline: Convicted cop-killer Carl Lucas, aka Frankenstein, is a superstar driver in the brutal prison yard demolition derby known as Death Race. Only one victory away from winning freedom for himself and his pit crew, Lucas is plunged into an all-new competition more vicious than anything he has experienced before. Pitted against his most ruthless adversaries ever, Lucas fights to keep himself and his team alive in a race in South Africa's infernal Kalahari Desert. With powerful forces at work behind the scenes to ensure his defeat, will Lucas' determination to win at all costs mean the end of the road for him? Written by Rodzer

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Kenneth Brown on January 19, 2013 -- Forgive me father for I have sinned. I got a sick kick out of Paul W.S. Anderson's Death Race. The entire time I was watching it, I knew it was genre junk parading as social commentary. The sort of high-concept, lowbrow, oil slick actioner that breathes and bleeds awful. But it was Big Dumb Fun at its purest, and it reeled me in; made me forget myself, forget that cold critical heart beating in my chest, forget that my cinematic duty is to rail against movies as unruly and unwieldy as Anderson's ode to Roger Corman's cult hit, Death Race 2000. I didn't despise it, though... I loved it. I have a copy sitting on my shelf right now. Worse? It's sitting next to a copy of Roel Reine's Death Race 2, a sequel everyone in the known world hated but I somehow enjoyed. Oh, I knew going in that it wouldn't be as entertaining, and it wasn't. I had a hunch its script, performances and races would reek of direct-to-video low-budgeting, and they did. But I still grinned, laughed and, somewhere between Sean Bean's first sinister sneer and Ving Rhames' last cheesy growl, relished my second stint on Terminal Island.

Fast forward two long years. Reine is back in the thick of the carnage, this time with Death Race 3: Inferno, a trilogy capper so tedious and dull, so undeniably bad it almost defies critical analysis. I can't say I'm surprised -- or rather I shouldn't be surprised -- but, somewhere along the way, I had apparently deluded myself into thinking Inferno would at least be a semi-decent guilty pleasure. Not so. From its painfully slow, laughably serious opening to its all too predictable endgame, Reine's prequel-sequel is a clunker through and through. It's almost as if no one on the production team, Reine included, was handed the official So You're Making a Death Race Sequel memo, which reads: Attach guns to cars. Place cars on track. Race around track with guns. Make cars 'splode. Attach bigger guns to bigger cars. Repeat until budget is exhausted. Roll credits. Chintzy cars with pellet pistols. Poorly edited, nonsensical races on desert non-tracks. Girl on girl blade battles. Hostile business takeovers. Splashes of silly, gratuitously staged blood-balloon gore. And some of the worst behind-the-wheel acting, stuntwork and action filmmaking you'll see all year. This isn't Death Race 3, it's Death of a Franchise: The Beginning, and it doesn't bode well for the inevitably horrendous sequels sure to come.

Doomed convict Carl Lucas (Luke Goss, Hellboy II: The Golden Army) -- you and the Death Race-addled public know him better as Frankenstein, the iron-masked racer -- only needs to win one more Death Race circuit to earn his freedom. Not that the corporate owners of the Pay Per View Death Race empire are remotely willing to let a prisoner, especially one of their most popular and successful broadcast antiheroes to date, walk out the front gate. Not only does Lucas have to race through the Kalahari Desert, he has to do so against more vile rival racers and through more deadly South African dangers than he's equipped to handle. Try to escape? A missile will be waiting to target the chip implanted in your neck. Attempt to win? An ever-changing slate of rules will topple the balance in your enemy's favor. Now Frankenstein has to fight for his freedom, protect his beautiful navigator (model Tanit Phoenix, Lord of War) and faithful pit crew (gruff Danny Trejo, Machete, and stammering Fred Koehler, Oz) from attacks on all sides, and find a way to take down the cruel new director of Death Race, Niles York (Dougray Scott).

I don't expect an innovative, thought-provoking plot. I know the mindless actioner I'm buying into. I don't expect clear, cohesive races. I know Reine is driving a fleet of weaponized junkyard derby cars in psuedo circles. I don't expect compelling drama. I know I'm essentially being sold a loose, unofficial adaptation of PSX, PS2-era videogame Twisted Metal. But I expect a cohesive story, even if it's barebones at best. I expect to be able to follow the progress of a race, if for no other reason than to bolster the intensity and bumper-to-bumper tension of the madness that transpires. I expect to connect with the characters, no matter how one-note and one-dimensional they are. Reine and screenwriter Tony Giglio's Inferno is a migraine in the making, complete with rapid, irritating quick-cuts and herky, jerky action scenes so littered with closeups and cutaways that it's next to impossible to tell what's happening at any given moment. Worse, the dialogue Goss and his castmates are forced to spew is lifted straight out of The Genre Writer's Handbook, which would be more of a problem if the supporting performances, and many of the most climactic standoffs, weren't so unbearable. Goss, Trejo, Koehler, Scott, Robin Shou and cool customer Ving Rhames are more than serviceable -- and more than Death Race 3 deserves -- but everyone else, chief among them curvy Phoenix (who wields a flame thrower like a hair dryer) and her fellow gladiatresses turned cockpit eye-candy, may as well be reading off cue cards. Because they are.

Somewhere between Death Race 2 and Inferno, Reine decided the franchise was due for some cinematic clout and respect. But in taking Death Race so seriously, he skips right past Big Dumb Dystopian Fun and lands on Big Dumb Dystopian Drama, and you'll never hear anyone defending a movie because of their affection for "Big Dumb Drama." Inferno is a humorless, inconsequential expansion of a series that rises and falls on its metal on metal violence, lock-jawed savagery and grindhouse swagger. Reine's latest installment is just gearing up for its first race at the half hour mark -- the half hour mark -- and nothing of import or consequence comes before it. (Or after it for that matter.) And when the long-gestating race goes nowhere fast, or anywhere at all, Reine resorts to race-to-race repetition, retreading old territory and piling one twist atop another until Inferno collapses under its own faux gravitas. If another Death Race comes to pass, Anderson would do well to put together a team who can stage an action scene while giving fans what they're looking for: cheap vehicular thrills, wild races and a healthy dose of, you guessed it, big dumb fun.

[CSW] -3.3- Some decent actors in this episode of the Death Race franchise, and although the story per-se isn't *horrible*, the dialog, camera work, and believability are ridiculously bad. Examples? How about a prison "full of the most violent criminals on the planet" - a significant number of whom are women who look like Victoria's Secret models... who also never manage to get dirty, can whoop up on guys twice their size, and always have perfect hair, cleavage, and makeup. Or maybe you'll just love the killer all girl fight anyway. If hot chicks, constant poorly-choreographed fight scenes, and gratuitous explosions and car wrecks are your thing, you'll dig it - but if you expect a movie to engage a little more than your brain-stem, you'll probably find yourself suddenly remembering that you need to rearrange your sock drawer instead of watching the whole movie. D-Box enhances the great stunt rides so much that it brought my rating up one whole point. If the ending had been a little better I might even have added this to my collection. But for most of you this is a wait-for-TV movie.
[V4.0-A4.0] MPEG-4 AVC - D-Box 10/10 -- D-Box really enhances this movie.

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