The Inferior Main Event

I won’t lie, I actually had high hopes for Death Race 3: Inferno. Not super high because, while fun and interesting, Death Race 2 wasn’t a good movie by conventional standards. We were rating on a curve, both based on the fact that the film was released direct to video, and also because it was a prequel (despite its numbering) to 2008’s Death Race, which was pretty terrible. The fact that Death Race 2 was actually watchable was high praise by comparison, and seeing as how there was a direct sequel with the same director, writer, and most of the same cast all involved, it seemed like that was a recipe for another decent entry in the series.

Boy, was I wrong. What a difference three years made because in that time apparently everyone forgot what made their previous film at all watchable. The story is boring, the writing is worse, the action is nigh unwatchable, the characters forgot most of what happened in the previous film making them seem really stupid considering this is a direct sequel, and all the actors, even the reliable character actors that can normally put on solid performances, feel like they’re here just for the paycheck. In short all the magic of the previous film is gone, giving us exactly what you’d expect from a direct-to-video Death Race movie: something terrible and unwatchable.

Not that it had to be this way. The setup for the film, moving the action away from Terminal Island and out to the deserts of Africa, feels like a good step. We can get different cars (many of which actually look distinct), different racing, and new kinds of action. The more open terrain should also lead to a story that feels more expansive, more like the very first Death Race 2000. But somewhere in the process all the good ideas were sucked out and we’re left with this hollowed out husk of a film released simply for the sake of continuing a story that didn’t really need to be continued. I know I frequently will note that sequels tend to be unnecessary, but that feels especially true in the case of Death Race 3:: Inferno.

It’s been a few racing seasons since Carl Lucas (Luke Goss) was rebranded as Frankenstein, his secret identity that keeps him safe from the bounty (formerly) on his head. His team – navigator Katrina Banks (Tanit Phoenix) and engineers Goldberg (Danny Trejo) and Lists (Fred Koehler) – don’t even know who he is, they just know that Frankenstein is the best. So good, in fact, that he’s won four of the required five races needed to get his freedom and leave prison altogether alongside his team.

There’s only one problem: the company run by R.H. Weyland (Ving Rhames) has been bought out by new upstart techbro CEO Niles York (Dougray Scott), and Niles needs Frankenstein to remain in the game. Frank is the draw, he’s what keeps people watching the race, and if he got his freedom Niles wouldn’t have a game anymore. Niles has big plans for his prison racing circuit, expanding it out past Terminal Island to multiple prisons around the world, and he needs Frankenstein at every one. So he makes a deal with Lucas, effectively blackmailing him: lose the race or die trying to win it. Now Lucas has to work with the team that no longer trusts him to try and find a way to get out of this mess with all their lives intact.

Death Race 2 was a prequel to Death Race, but it somehow managed to avoid many of the pitfalls of being a prequel by starting early enough before the first movie that most of the characters (outside of Robin Shou’s 14K) didn’t have any plot armor. We knew that the whole death racing program would start up, and then a character named Frankenstein would eventually get into the game, but who, how, or for what reasons was still unknown to us. We didn’t have a special connection to anyone in the film so everything felt fresh. No limits, no restrictions.

Death Race 3: Inferno doesn’t get that same grace. Taking place between the first and second films and, very obviously, directly tying into the first film, all with characters we knew from the second film, this third movie in the series suffers from being both a prequel and a sequel. It has to strain to tie itself into the first film while also struggling to balance the needs of the characters introduced in the second that, it presumes, we care about and want to see get a happy ending (if that’s even possible in this world). Everyone has plot armor, all the events are preordained, nothing feels fresh.

The film goes out of its way, in fact, to undo most of what happened in the second film, as bonkers as that is, all so that it can tie into the original Death Race differently than expected. At that start of that first film the original (we assumed) Frankenstein dies. But if that guy is dead that means the “hero” of the second film, Carl Lucas, is dead. That’s what the second film sets up with its ending, so now this third film has to retcon it all. No, he wasn’t horribly burned at the end of the second film; that was all fixed with extensive plastic surgery. His team doesn’t know who he is, even though he clearly hinted he was the rebranded Frankenstein to them. The adventures don’t simply continue over on Terminal Island, where actors that would be too expensive to hire for their roles would presumably be working; instead everything moves elsewhere to a race setup we hadn’t heard about before (and probably won’t ever hear about again). It’s all very ham-fisted and stupid.

And that would be fine, mind you, if the action were at all good. It’s not, though. A lot of the problems come down to bad direction and poor choices. For starters, the film never gives us a sense of the scope of this new racing setting. The first lap takes us through desert dunes, through a small town, and then out past a terrorist camp before the racers make their way back to the prison. The next lap goes through a more rocky area before hitting a town, although maybe not the same town, and then the terrorists again. The third throws all that out the window and mostly focuses on desert once more. How all these regions connect, and how the drivers are supposed to navigate any of it, isn’t made entirely clear. And if it’s unclear to them it’s absolutely unclear to us.

This compounds an issue that the first two films tried to ignore: why do the drivers even have navigators? Well, okay, that’s because they were in Death Race 2000, and the remake series borrowed the format. But when you look at it, navigators don’t make any sense. The first two films are set on a closed track prison where navigation is already known. The drivers could handle that on their own. It makes more sense in this film, especially if they have a wide open route to take, except here the navigator doesn’t actually navigate. Katrina sits in the side seat and looks shocked most of the time while Goldberg, presumably following along via GPS, navigates for the team. Katrina doesn’t even need to be here.

That actually holds in a couple of ways because she effectively has no arc here at all. Her job is to be mad at Lucas for not telling her he was Frankenstein (which, again, he did at the end of Death Race 2) and then forgive him so they can go back to being in love by the end of the film. She has no other function in the story at all, she’s simply pushed back to where she was earlier in her story so she can do her arc all over again. It’s stupid and totally betrays her character… not that she was much of one to begin with, but still.

And topping all of that off, the action and acting are bad. It’s hard to watch what’s going on in the film because, despite wide-open expanses and plenty of room to maneuver, everything is filmed tight and close up with so much over-editing it becomes impossible to comprehend the racing. And because the actors don’t care about their performances, even the sections taking place in the cars, and off the track, don’t matter. Everyone is going through the motions just trying to get to the end of the film, the end of the race, so we can finally tie back into the first film and all these people can be free of their contracts. While I can’t really blame them for that, it does make for a pretty lackluster third part of this series.

Death Race 3: Inferno is bad, make no mistake. It’s honestly even worse than the first film, 2008’s Death Race. It’s the kind of film I imagine from the worlds “direct to video, Death Race sequel”. Somehow Death Race 2 was able to avoid that issue, but Death Race 3: Inferno wasn’t so lucky. It’s so bad, so empty, so disposable that you could skip it entirely and not even feel like you missed anything. Hell, the second film ties right into the first, from a certain perspective, so if you never wanted to watch this third film you don’t have to. That’s probably the best call you could make.