The opening minute explains the rules of the race. There’s no getting lapped twice, no stepping on the grass or off the path, and you have no choice but to race. If you break one of the rules, your head explodes and you die. The setting looks like an abandoned prison. There are 80 participants with no idea how they got there.
For the majority of the first half the action awkwardly cuts back and forth from the race to the lives of some of the participants before they ended up in the potentially fatal contest, but not enough to develop any of them into someone we know even a little or care about. Usually it introduces someone, kills them a few minutes later, and then jumps to another character. It’s a strange and ineffective storytelling method. There is no one to root for. While the first half jumps around from the race to random people’s back stories, the second takes a different approach, which only reinforces the feeling that Hough was making it up as he went along, without a finished screenplay to guide him. The home stretch briefly introduces a villain (even though the whole point is to survive and win the race, so it’s hardly unreasonable to be willing to do anything to make that happen) before transitioning to two deaf participants. At first they seem like a couple, but then it’s clear that they are not. Suddenly a good 10-15 minutes (out of the movie’s total of 85) are spent on them as they work together and then try to kill one another. It’s painfully drawn out.
As for the race itself, the movie fails to generate a sense of mystery or any suspense whatsoever. You won’t care how they got there or who forced them to compete in the race. You won’t even be thinking about that as you marvel at the stiff acting, haphazard storytelling, and exploding heads. The effects guys probably had a blast as at least 20 heads explode on screen. At a certain point it becomes unintentionally hilarious. The Human Race, however, takes itself very seriously complete with frequent use of somber music, slow-motion, and voiceover.
If forced to say something nice, well, a few deaths are genuinely shocking. People not normally killed off in the movies are disposed of in brutal fashion. But those moments add up to about a minute, leaving another 84 to sit through (and it’s amazing how long 85 minutes can feel while you’re watching a bad movie). That this is the filmmaker’s first feature-length offering is no surprise. The entire endeavor feels like amateur hour. It’s poorly conceived and poorly executed. If you are thinking about checking it out, read “The Long Walk instead.”
