Know Your Enemy

“We become stupider and more bestial the longer we’re forced to watch them. Likewise, the separate action-bozo oeuvres of Ice Cube, DMX, Milla Jovovich and all the second-rankers and second-raters. They come with their own directors, guys who specialise in this kind of undifferentiated action-emptiness, like Paul W S Anderson – whose back catalogue is as calamitous as Alan Smithee’s and his Gallic doppelganger Mathieu Kassovitz (and I say this as a fan of ‘La Haine’ who wonders what the hell happened). The result is a film landscape that calls to mind the arid, dispiriting wasteland that was the latter part of Charles Bronson’s career – all cheap vengeance and bullshit frontier justice, the ceaseless adoration of brute strength and an allergy to any kind of intelligence or nuance.”

The release of ‘Death Race’ prompts John Patterson into an all-out assault on the descendents of “the whole Van Damme-Seagall-Lundgren Axis of Idiocy”.