Fasten your seat belt

Watching this movie is looking into the eye of a metal storm. It's every car chase you've ever seen on steroids--especially ones staged underneath an elevated train, like in The French Connection. Plus Baghdad or Falluja. Death Race isn't just a race, it's a full-on battle. The cars are shooting automatic weapons and throwing napalm and smoke and oil at each other, while being fired upon from outside by employees of the prison where it all takes place. No, there's not much time for character or snappy dialogue. I for one was glad to do without the macho taunts of the Fast and Furious francise. But stay tuned; there's a new one of those with both Paul Walker and Vin Diesel!

These drivers are the worst of the worst, the baddest of the baddest, prisoners who'll risk death to gain release. It's some time in the not so distant future when America has had economic and moral mega-meltdowns. Alll penal institutions are run by private companies for profit (not much of a stretch). Joan Allen is Hennessy, a steely, smirking super Warden masterminding a battle to the death of 800-horsepower hot rods covered in steel armor-plating driven by muscular baddies (among them Jason Strathem as"Jensen Ames," a fired steelworker/former race driver falsely convicted of killing his wife, and Tyrese Gibson as "Machine Gun Joe," Jensen's nemesis/ally in the race). With the drivers, except Joe is gay so he gets a guy partner, to further turn on the story's paying online subscription audience, are luscious-babe prisoners as navigators. Jensen is assigned Case, played by the irresistible and authentically luscious Natalie Martinez of TV's "Fashion House" and "Saints and Sinners."

Paying customers online, whose dough is the ostensible reason for all this mayhem, surrender $99 a stage or $250 for the whole game to receive 75 selectable online camera feeds, and at its peak subscription there's an audience for the Death Race of 70 million people. Think how lucky we are: we only have to pay twelve dollars. And think of the filmmakers' fantasy--crap like this making literally billions in a single afternoon.

It's just good clean noisy down-and-dirty maniac killer fun. It's also, as the opening of the movie points out, a replay of the gladiatorial events of the Roman Empire in its days of decline. Even more, though, it's based on a movie called Death Race 2000 (actually released in 1975)--for no franchise-ready movies are ever original. And more even than it's like that, Death Race is conceived and structured like, and looks like, a 90-minute gonzo video game. "W.S.," the British-born director (Brits the ace schlockmeisters of today's Hollywood), is a specialist in "VG to movie" adaptations and has had something to do with same for Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, Spyhunter, Castlevania--most notably Resident Evil, which is going into its fourth episode.

For sure there are what's called in the opening credits "Visual Effects," but the car racing/crashing is authentic, or authentic-looking enough, for there to be a warning at the film's end: These stunts, it says in one way or another, were performed under controlled conditions with professional drivers. Don't try this at home! Gee, you mean some of this is, like, actually real? Probably not a good idea to drive your car over 35 mph for 24 hours after watching this, if you're suggestible at all.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.