Raze Review: Super Violence Misses the Point

The female throwdown Raze isn't predictable, but its execution is highly suspect.



Set in a mix of 70's women's prison action piece and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Raze tells the story of 50 kidnapped women who set against each other in a series of one-one-one brawls to the death. At the top of that heap lies the soldier Sabrina (Zoe Bell), whose rap sheet includes escaping a POW camp. She and the other women - including the psychopath Phoebe (Rebecca Marshall) - must kill one another or risk seeing their family die a horrific assassination. The event is organized by a husband and wife team (Doug Jones and Sherilyn Fenn) whose supposedly ancient group has been culling women since forever. As Zoe and Phoebe head towards a violent showdown, a new player enters the field that represents Sabrina's last hope for escape.

Director Josh Waller miscasts several leads and gets only B-grade acting from those who stick around. What's more, Waller wastes his best assets on either all-too-short cameos or all-too-early exits. Rachel Nichols? Whacked in the first 5 minutes. Rosario Dawson? Easily dispensed. As producer, Bell makes the classic mistake of making her story the central theme - rather than expanding the drama to include these kinds of top talent, she and Weller reduce the story to a title card before each battle, with the loser dying in thoroughly non-creative ways. His last cue card - "Sabrina vs. Everybody" - is rather Tarantino-esque, and it's clear that he's trying to channel both him and Robert Rodriguez.

And that's the problem - without the real deal guiding it, Raze feels like a cheap knock-off, content to glorify violence without telling us why it happens in this sick and twisted manner. That reality lies squarely on the shoulders of Writers Robert Beaucage and Kenny Gage, who miss potentially insightful moments for glorified violence. Sure no one is supposed to survive, but that's not the point. Instead of becoming a female empowerment movie, our heroes are taken down one by one, with faceless men only needing to point their guns to establish their power. Yet for all the fighting, we never truly know anything about these characters, except that the imprisioned love their families and hope to see them soon. Jones and Fenn rattle on about their family committing these atrocities for hundreds of years, yet we know nothing about them and care less each time their celebrations appear on-screen. How they enlist or appease their gun-toting prison guards is never explained, and we're forced to settle in to the desensitizing violence that becomes a hallmark of Raze. 

And then there's the clothing, which is reduced to simple skin-tight a-shirts and rolled up grey pants - how these things stay on during the fight sequences is beyond me, and a simple wardrobe malfunction would have yielded so much more fun.

Wasting its best assets on either cameo performances or all-too early exits, Raze's nonsense and shoddy performances aspire only as high as those women's prison films of the 70's. The result is something to watch only if you're into sick gory fights with zero nudity or bondage.

Raze is rated R for strong brutal bloody violence throughout, and language and has a runtime of 87 minutes.

Discuss this review with fellow SJF fans on Facebook. On Twitter, follow us at @SandwichJohnFilms, and follow author Matt Cummings at @mfc90125.

Please leave a comment.