'Death Race' Goes Nowhere Very Fast

Death Race!

It's to the credit of director Paul W.S. Anderson ("Alien vs. Predator," "Resident Evil," "Mortal Kombat") that he is so fixed on the race that he doesn't bother to follow through on the bigotry. After learning early in the film that Jensen Ames's main foil, Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson), may have a thing for the fellas, the idea is dropped, and Machine Gun Joe is re-masculinized just in time for . . . the death race!

Unfortunately, the same can't be said for Anderson and misogyny, which he focuses on with the same single-minded attention he reserves for decapitations, explosions, profanity and sexual humiliation. Allen hasn't just accidentally gotten herself caught up in one god-awful but forgettable film. She is participating in an atrocious spectacle of woman-hating.

Every detail about her dress and deportment -- the perfectly tailored skirts and jackets, the little necklace peeking through the chastely open white shirt, the lipstick and perfect coif, the stiff back and the decisive manner -- has been calculated to set Allen apart from the grubby mob of prisoners. She presides over their misery from a sleek, uncluttered desk. She also emerges as the perfect stand-in for a career woman, the one men hate because she got ahead, went up the ladder and seems to hold all the cards. She's the woman who drives by in the nice car, making deals on her cellphone, as the steel plant shutters its rusty gates and casts you adrift in the cruel world of unemployment.

Or perhaps Allen's role has nothing to do with class envy and lunch-pail misogyny. She is, after all, a television producer as well as a jail warden. Perhaps this is really Hollywood's own venture into violent fantasies against women, dressed up and imputed to the NASCAR crowd.

In any case, it's an odious role, and while Allen plays it well, that's not much of an accomplishment. This is one-dimensional evil, a feminine effigy waiting to be torn down and trampled under the boot of male rage.

The saddest thing about "Death Race" is that it has nothing to say about the present. It isn't just a remake of a 1975 film, it's a time warp back to 1975, to the anxieties sparked by the gas crisis, rampant inflation, woman's lib and the decay of American industrial might. A remake might ask, what are today's anxieties? And how can a death race address them? But this isn't a film that asks questions.

Death race: That's all you need to know.

Death Race (105 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for strong violence and language.