Death Race

Death Race makes no pretense of being anything but what it is: a boom-pow-splat thrill ride. And as that, it works, quite well actually.

Let Death Race serve as a warning, or maybe an inspiration, to any TV producer who says she'd kill for high ratings: Why not stage a pay-per-view car race in which prisoners compete to stay alive on the course?

I admire its purity of heart and frankness of intention, and even though Anderson has a lot to learn about shaping an extended action sequence, when that big truck flipped up in the air, vanquished, I was, like, wow. Cool.

Death Race has everything you could want in a big-budget B-Movie -- cool car chases, spectacular crashes, beautiful women, tough men, and a good old fashioned revenge tale.

The new Death Race is at once more conservative and more extreme than its inspiration. It's also much less witty and imaginative, and as much a prison film as a racing movie.

It’s totally brainless, but that’s just as well since any brains would just be splattered across the track anyway.

While steel-plated cars bristling with firepower are guaranteed to get adolescent hearts stirring, the movie offers myriad pleasures for adults. After all, how often do you get to hear Joan Allen intone, “Release the Dreadnaught”?

Offers exactly what action film fans would expect: squealing tires, blazing guns and spectacular crashes. Serviceable storytelling and dialogue that won't make you cover your eyes and shake your head are pleasant surprises.

Filled with weaponized vehicles, pyrotechnics, exploding skulls and some mesmerizingly enormous female breasts -- but no sex or love-stuff -- Death Race seems almost scientifically designed to trigger every boy's prepubescent pleasure-centers.

Like first love -- or maybe just a crowbar to the Adam's apple -- Death Race works fast and hits hard. A prison flick and a car chase movie at the same time? I am so there.

It doesn't set out to do more than provide an hour and a half of fight scenes and car crashes. It accomplishes that, and with a certain amount of style, a few twists and a minimum of plot holes.

Opens with the sound of squealing car tires and pretty much never lets up. It's a violent cartoon, and what makes it work is that Death Race has a healthy sense of its own ridiculousness.

Though not as politically sharp as the original, this remake has a terrific cast on hand to smooth over some rough spots.

This remake of Roger Corman's camp classic spackles enough blood and burnt rubber into the gaping plot holes it's easy to ignore them until the ride home.

Death Race makes no pretense to be any other kind of movie than what it is: a big, loud and often dumb exercise in smashin' cars and blowin' stuff up. And, as such, it's a lot of fun, a true guilty pleasure.

Death Race involves lots of racing and lots of death, as you'd imagine. Nonracing/nondeath fans will have to look a little harder to keep occupied, but Anderson does have at times an interestingly skewed societal perspective.

It's more of a video game than a movie, but its budget is on the screen and it delivers what its ad campaign promises.

Whether it's video games or Alien vs. Predator or Death Race, Anderson, like Corman, gets plenty of A's for enthusiasm in his approach to B-movie schlock.

The story may be predictable, but McShane's deadpan humor steals scenes. Allen proves she can play any role anywhere, elevating the film to a level it doesn't really deserve.

The fact that Death Race actually has a plot larger than running over little old ladies is incidental, but welcome nonetheless.

Ideal for those who want to watch a bunch of cars blow each other up, without having to, you know, think about it all that much. It's the perfect end-of-summer film, and a sign that summer needs to end soon.

Death Race doles out disreputable damage with such bone-crushing, heavy-metal conviction that you can almost smell the napalm, nitro and diesel fumes.

It's just another exercise in future shock schlock, driving safely in the right lane when it should be careening out of control.

Statham shows off his muscles, Allen does a sexy-schoolmarm number and female cons show cleavage, but most of the heat in Death Race comes from explosions.

Death Race is Ben-Hur for video-game junkies. Around and around they go, machine guns blazing.

Sure, Death Race is bad, by most measures -- you're not expecting Oscar-worthy acting in a movie called Death Race, are you? But for action afficionados, Death Race delivers the goods, fast.

The Death Race title pretty much says it all, except that the high-tech, re-imagined version drains all the fun out of a cheesy 1970s macabre road-race comic satire.

Death Race should at least score points for its title, which is more apt than, say, Feelings Exploration.

A serviceable, forgettable genre film marked by leaden performances, even more leaden dialogue, a few sterlingly gruesome images, and a supremely campy performance from Joan Allen.

Paul Anderson seems to operate on the theory that failures to communicate can easily be covered up by moving the camera really fast, making loud screeching noises and blowing things up.

Death Race isn't as funny, freaky or satirical as Death Race 2000. It's a remake toned and dumbed down for modern tastes, or lack thereof. The movie amuses but doesn't exactly thrill.

For those looking for mindless violent entertainment, it's just about good enough to fill the bill.

Anderson just puts the pedal to the metal and never taps the brakes, ignoring such typical movie traffic laws as character interaction and lucid plot development.

By the standards of a low-expectation action fan, the new Death Race does a passable job.

So what if Death Race is just one clichéd excuse to smash up cars; it still kind of gets the adrenaline flowing.

Whatever plot there is crawls into the backseat, and then the trunk, as Death Race really is about the creative ways these nuts find to kill each other.

The lure of Death Race is not so much Statham and his remarkable abs nor Allen, but the amazing refitted autos which roar across the screen, smashing apart in fiery bursts of metal, rubber and body parts.

Although Death Race delivers more than enough blood and bone-crunching fight scenes, the film boasts some of the most laughable dialogue you are likely to hear.

Lawrence Toppman's cerebral cortex shut down during the opening moments of Death Race, when it realized brain damage could result from watching the entire film with full attention.

What plot exists here is so nonsensical, so hackneyed that it doesn't deserve or need explanation.

Death Race is for moviegoers who like their action down, dirty, dastardly and deadly. Not to mention loud.

The 1975 Roger Corman-produced, Paul Bartel-directed cult classic gets supercharged with action and bloodshed in this remake, but the anarchic humor is gone.

Let's forget the fact that this remake completely misses the point of the original and focus on the fact that Death Race is literally its own video game tie-in.

Well, you've got to say this for Death Race: It knows what it is and doesn't apologize for it. What it is, incidentally, is junk.

Statham is always a charismatic presence in his movies, and he deserves better than this. But the saddest thing is seeing Allen in it. She is in such a state of shock, her forehead does not move the tiniest bit in the entire film.

The combination of good actors and terrible dialogue might have allowed the film a chance at minor cult status, if it weren't for the frustratingly inept action sequences.

Movies like Death Race exist so critics will have something to put on their year-end "Worst Of" lists.

The biggest distraction is how the hell they got three-time Oscar nominee Joan Allen to sign up for this gumbo? Statham fits his role fine, but casting Allen as his emotionless puppet master is a head-scratcher.

Hitchcock said a movie should play the audience like a piano. Death Race played me like a drum. It is an assault on all the senses, including common.

So grisly, hyperbolized and aimless that the sum effect is pornographic. No sex anywhere, but that's what it is: Car-crash porn for the modern audience.

Anderson has neutered the original film's outrageously transgressive macadam mayhem and completely stripped the story of its pointedly political social satire, making this Death Race one of the most boring drags of all time.

In movies like The Bank Job, Jason Statham has shown the potential to be a British Steve McQueen, but he'll never get the chance if he keeps making gobblers like Death Race.

The movie just crunches metal, squishes drivers' heads like oranges and assumes the viewers in our current society are as blood-thirsty as the ones onscreen. Are they?