'Death Race' Goes Nowhere Very Fast

Before execrating "Death Race" as a cultural abomination with no redeeming value, let's take note of several of its significant technical accomplishments. It may not be possible to make a film with less plot and more action. And the testosterone saturation level has also been pushed to the very limits of earthly possibility. If a movie could drag its knuckles on the ground, "Death Race" would leave eight little tracks in the sand.

"Death Race" is supposedly based on the 1975 cult favorite "Death Race 2000," which involved a savage cross-country road rally in heavily armored cars. While some critics detected elements of satire and political commentary in the original (which starred David Carradine), all of that has been successfully eliminated from the current model. The new "Death Race" fuses demolition derbies, NASCAR, rockets, guns, napalm, sadistic prison guards and nasty, careerist women who don't know their place in a man's world. It isn't so much a movie as a superheated, highly conductive miracle substance for the pure transmission of masculine aggression and misogyny.

Death Race.

Death Race.

The very title of the movie -- and the whole film is in that title -- makes you want to say it over and over again, in a low, ominous voice.

There is no question about "Death Race" to which "death race" isn't the answer.

The plot? A series of contrivances that create the preconditions necessary for . . . a death race. The characters? The usual stock figures, good and bad, strong and weak, human and all-too-human, who meet their deserved fate in . . . a death race. The denouement? That would be . . . a death race. (Actually, the whole film is a death race; it is fatuous to speak of a denouement.)

Maybe there's one question the answer to which isn't obvious from the title: What the hell is Joan Allen doing in "Death Race"? Allen is (was?) a respectable actress, with a Tony Award, a Broadway career and three Academy Award nominations. In this abominably cynical film, she plays Hennessey, a prison warden who is also the producer of a popular pay-per-view gladiatorial combat known as "Death Race." It is 2012, the U.S. economy is in shambles, the country is run by thugs and prison is just a burned-out taillight away. In the grim gray world of Allen's prison, the only hope of escape is to win . . . the death race.

Of course, Jensen Ames (Jason Statham), the hero of "Death Race," has been framed for a crime he didn't commit -- killing his lovely and devoted, subservient yet sexy wife.

Of course, Ames has been shanghaied into Hennessey's prison, where she presides over the automotive blood sport with chilling calm and an infuriating little smile, dealing death to the desperate drivers in a cruel bid for high drama and ratings.

Of course, each driver in the death race is entitled to a navigator, even though the whole thing happens in a prison and there aren't a lot of opportunities to get lost. And, of course, the navigators are all long-legged, big-chested bombshells in tighty-tight shorts, brought in from "upstate" where they keep the lady cons.

Except for the gay driver, who has a boy navigator.