YMMV / Death Race

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Some people believe that Hennessey actually means it when she implies that she wants to give inspiration to the audience and move them, and simply views manipulating Jensen into participating as a means to a positive end. Hennessey intends it as a genuine gesture of goodwill, rather that using something "hard to come by" to her advantage as a hook for higher viewers and therefore higher profits.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The Dreadnought, an absolute beast of a machine, resembling a War Rig from Fury Road, took apparently weeks to build, literally designed to decimate the racers, with 50. cal guns everywhere, a flamethrower, rocket launchers and even an actual tank turret with capture spikes under it to enable the turret to give point-blank death, is introduced and taken out by Jensen and Joe using a deathshead trap and some distraction driving in about two minutes after it is deployed.
• Audience-Coloring Adaptation: It eclipsed the original Death Race 2000 to the point that, when Roger Corman announced Death Race 2050, a Spiritual Successor to 2000 that went back to its campier grindhouse tone, fans of the remake and its sequels absolutely hated it. (Critics, especially those familiar with the original, were a lot nicer.)
• Complete Monster: The Big Bads of the first and third movies count:
  • 2008 film: Claire Hennessey is introduced casually strolling through the yard unguarded to show how much even the worst inmates fear her. She rebuilt the Terminal Island prison to include a racetrack where the prisoners perform Death Races with the promise of being released after winning five times, broadcasting the event to make a hefty profit. The racers and their female navigators die in the most brutal and graphic ways in the races, getting run over, blown up, or gutted by each other or Hennessey's armored trucks. She arranges to kill anyone close to winning five races, as she did with the original Frankenstein, a mask-wearing crowd favorite. She orders the innocent Jensen Ames's wife killed and frames him for it, then once he's in her prison blackmails him with his daughter's well-being to force him to take up Frankenstein's mantle.
  • Inferno: Smug billionaire Niles York forcibly buys the Death Race from its owner and intends on taking it global to cause as much mayhem and death as possible. Cheating Frankenstein, the most popular racer, out of freedom, York threatens him into a race by promising to torture him and his girlfriend should he refuse, while promoting as much death and bloodshed as possible during the race. When he faces a loss, York is fine using missiles on a civilian population if it should get him what he desires.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Friendly Rival 14K, who had the honor of being in two prequels.
  • Olga, for being the first female driver and getting a nice Damsel out of Distress scene against Nero.
  • Machine Gun Joe's second and third navigators (specifically the one forced into his car kicking and screaming, and the guy who actually seems happy to be there) are quite memorable.
  • Apache has some fans for his Outside Ride stunt.
• Faux Symbolism: The United States economy collapses in 2012, the year the world is supposed to end according to superstition. They also throw in Grimm's belief that Hennessey is an avatar of the Hindu goddess of death, Kali.
• Fridge Logic:
  • The Dreadnought comes out during the second day of the race and tries to kill everybody, and very nearly succeeds. ... What was Hennessy going to do for the third day of the race? Just have it drive around the track by itself firing of weapons at nothing?
    • Coach was probably correct that she'd have called it off before then. Possibly she'd been planning for the last racer alive to face the Dreadnought one-on-one in the final contest, and, of course, it would have won.
  • If the navigators are only involved in the race for in-Verse Fanservice's sake, why wasn't Machine Gun Joe's male navigator a hunk? You'd think Hennessey would take the opportunity to broaden the show's fanbase - drawing in untapped straight female and gay male pay-per-view dollars - by tossing a bit of expendable beefcake into the mix. And there's bound to be some good-looking dudes in her prison she can coerce into the role.
    • Probably for the same reason why Joe was getting male navigators in the first place, he keeps getting them killed, wasting good face talent would drop ratings.
  • Hennessey does not seem to understand the rule of diminishing returns. If she had managed to kill Jensen and replaced him with a third Frank, then sooner or later, the viewing public is going to start falling out of love with a guy who keeps on losing.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Statham and Tyrese would reunite in 2015's Furious 7, only this time Tyrese is part of the hero's team while Statham initially serves as the antagonist, before getting into an Enemy Mine situation and having a Heel–Face Turn later in the series.
• Ho Yay:
  • Jensen and Machine Gun Joe. They end up living together in Mexico with Jensen's daughter.
  • And there's that one guard that seems to love watching Jensen do just about anything...
  • The second movie is full of it, as YMS points out in his review.
• Magnificent Bastard: Jensen Ames was framed for the murder of his wife and wrongfully imprisoned and forced to take up the mantle of Death Race champion "Frankenstein". Learning that one of the racers is his wife's killer, Jensen pulls off a strategy that incapacitates and kills him. Learning that his wife's death was orchestrated by prison Warden Claire Hennessey and that she doesn't intend on letting anyone walk out of the prison alive, Jensen convinces Frankenstein's rival Machine Gun Joe to work with him so that they can both escape the island, and has his crew take out the bomb that Hennessey snuck into his car, which is then mailed to her and detonated.
• Moment of Awesome: Jensen brutally beating up the man who murdered his wife twice and later, defeats him in vehicular combat by turning his car to face him head on so they can both unload their machine into each other face to face, despite his partner warning him that his opponent's car was more heavily armed. Luckily, this turns out to be a trick to goad the scumbag into being blast by Jensen smoke-screen, causing him to crash, at which point Jensen slams his car door into him as he's crawling out, before personally snapping his neck.
• Spiritual Licensee: This would've made an excellent version of Twisted Metal! It was absolutely brilliant how they devised away to adapt the weapons pick-ups often found in video games of the Wacky Racing genre — electric sensors in the ground that when turned on and driven over, deactivate the kill switch, thus allowing them to be used. A great way to fake the "transfer" of weapons from one car to another.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Having Olga apparently get run down right after her impressive victory over Nero (through the use of the weapon from her wrecked car) feels pretty cheap.
  • Having Apache be the very next kill in the second movie right after taking out a driver in a novel and creative Outside Ride way.

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