
There’s
something to be said for a movie that knows exactly what it is and then whacks that
knowledge home like a rusty pipe in the face. Case in point: "Death Race," a delectable
bit of B-movie savagery that actually does feature pipe melees, among much other
kicky (and punchy and impaled-by-a-metal-spikey) ultraviolence.
The premise, updated from the 1975 cult classic "Death Race 2000," is simple, sick
and satisfying. In the year 2012, in response to the collapsing American economy,
shady corporations have taken over the prison system and reap huge profits by staging
gladiatorial pay-per-view contests among the prisoners.
Out on Terminal Island, where the worst of the worst participate in the wildly popular
Death Race showdown, an ice-queen warden named Hennessey (Joan Allen, slumming with
style) faces a crisis. Her star driver, a mask-wearing psychopath named Frankenstein,
has just met his maker at the tip of a missile. In a bid to maximize ratings, Hennessey
hatches a plot to replace Frankenstein with Jensen Ames (Jason Statham), a former
racing champ.
Framed for the murder of his wife and shuffled off to Terminal Island, fury mounting
and muscles rippling, Jensen is pressed into fending off a grimy assortment of gearhead
sociopaths with the promise that if he wins the race he’s free to go. Needless to
say, things are about to blow up, quite literally, in everyone’s face.
And how they blow! Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, a low-rent genre artisan who
seems to have figured out a thing or two since staging"Alien vs. Predator" (or at
least found a better crew to back him up), “Death Race” is a supercharged junkyard
apocalypse powered by an unabashed relish for brutal comeuppance and a flair for
delirious vehicular mayhem.
Extended over three increasingly frantic, vividly murderous rounds, the Death Race
itself is a tour de force of no-nonsense neo-grindhouse. Anchored by the ever-dependable
Mr. Statham and his gruff, buff stoicism, the movie is legitimately greasy, authentically
nasty, with a good old-fashioned sense of laying waste to everything in sight —
including the shallow philosophizing and computer-generated fakery that have overrun
the summer blockbuster.
No fancy talk here, just solid, monosyllabic obscenities; no flights of digital
fancy, just souped-up monster cars flipping end over end in a napalm blaze and crashing
in a crunch of flaming metal ouch.