Quotes of the Day

Is it just me — I mean, me and my infallible film sense — or are action movies getting better while nearly every other genre has gone fallow and flaccid? I'm no special fan of cine-mayhem, but I'm buoyed by the craft and verve of recent entertainments like Iron Man, Speed Racer, Wanted, Hellboy and The Dark Knight. Even so-so entries like The Incredible Hulk and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Billionaire Sexagenarians Trying to Recapture the Glories of Their Middle Years interrupt their meandering with set pieces that are figuratively or literally dynamite — like an old Astaire-Rogers movie that comes to soaring life when the couple starts dancing.

This summer has proved that the action film is where most of the talent has gone: into the technique and technology of pure moviemaking, of getting the viewer's blood racing by blowing stuff up. Handmade art is on the wane; machine art is here to stay. The gentle crafts of acting, of sculpting witty dialogue, of a director's subtle sense of where to lead the camera and the audience may be in decline, but the second-unit guys and stuntmen and CGI wizards are at the top of their game. It's not the highest form of the seventh art, but it is one of the original definitions of the medium to make cinema kinetic, to make movies move.

Move is what Death Race does; it's an eight-cylinder vehicle from which some prankster removed the brakes. It's got the red meat of fanboy film ardor: cars with guns — the movie's tag line is "Gentlemen, start your weapons" — and cons with girls. Though the picture doesn't deserve to appear on any critic's 10-best list, it observes the minimum standards of modern action films, which is to say it looks smarter, talks sassier and moves faster than almost anything else on the market.

Based on the 1975 Death Race 2000, which we'll get to later, the new picture was scripted and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who did the Resident Evil series and a few other artifacts of high-hackdom. (This Anderson, a Brit, is not ever to be confused with the U.S.-bred, high-art fave Paul Thomas Anderson, of There Will Be Blood renown). But the movie is less a one-man show than a highly complex, finely tuned product, manufactured by an army of geek specialists and cyber-grease monkeys. What Death Race loses in soul — which would be extraneous baggage in an effort like this — it gains in group ingenuity.

Motorpsycho Nightmare
It's 2012, we're told at the start. The U.S. economy has collapsed. Prisons have been privatized. The government rules with an iron fist, and the populace is sedated with violent entertainment. (Wait, this isn't futurism; it's a Daily Kos blog.) On a nouveau Alcatraz called Terminal Island, Warden Hennessey (Joan Allen, merging her purse-lipped Pat Nixon impersonation with the imperious tenseness of Dick Nixon in late-Watergate mode) is in charge of an annual televised car-nage held on a giant track within the prison. In this Death Race, lifers drive the souped-up, heavily armed autos, and are promised an early release if they win five races. One of the inmates, a masked mystery man known as Frankenstein, is a four-time champion, hence the pay-per-view audience's favorite roadster. Hennessey's secret problem: Frank died from injuries suffered in the last race. She needs a new guy to put on the mask and slip behind the wheel of the Frankencar.

That man is Jensen Ames (Anglo action star Jason Statham), an ex-con steelworker who for the moment is happily at home with his loving wife and adorable infant. All that changes when wifey is stabbed to death and Jensen wakes up next to her corpse with a bloody knife in his hand. He's quickly convicted and sent off to Terminal Island, where Hennessey awaits him with the chance to get out by assuming the guise of Frankenstein in the imminent three-day rally. "I'm offering you your freedom, Mr. Ames," she says. "If that's not worth risking your life for, what is?"

His opponents, all veterans of previous races, include Afro-dude Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson), the neo-Nazi Pachenko (Max Ryan), an ex-NASCAR, now NAStyCAR driver named Travis (Justin Mader) and the martial-artistic 14K (Robin Shou). When they're not playing bumper cars, they're taunting one another or spitting in a rival's food — animals marking their turf. Each driver is given a navigator, a babe on loan from a nearby women's prison, and Ames's is Case (Natalie Martinez), who has pneumatic skills of her own. Sitting next to him in their two-seater Ford Mustang GT with the mini-gun .308 and MG-42 8mm. weapons attached to the front, she may be Ames's doom or his salvation. Or she may be there just for her looks: an eye-catching hood ornament, moved inside for safety.

The cars are armed, but the track is booby-trapped. Manhole covers may explode as the cons drive over them; guards with machine guns open fire at Hennessey's command; one car gets napalmed. It's like al Qaeda at Daytona. Naturally, several of the participants, racing careers are ended prematurely — beheading is the movie's favorite form of early retirement — which forces competing drivers to become occasional allies, as when Ames and Machine Gun Joe "play a little offense," teaming up to demolish one of Hennessey's fire-spewing trucks. Round and round they go, till... but by now you know the heroes and villains, and who'll get sprung or splattered before this motorpsycho nightmare is over.

It's anyone's guess why a California lockup is housing an unreconstructed Limey like Statham; he's one of those English stars who shows up every few decades (like Cary Grant or Michael Caine) and refuses to drop his working-class, home-town accent. Anderson must have figured that the star of the Transporter series, and The Bank Job and a couple of Guy Ritchie gangland fantasies, would bring along his action-film bona fides. Which he does. Also his impressive torso. One of the movie's few moments of relative repose is a long, loving shot of Statham exercising in his cell, the taut muscles of his upper back pulsing under his flesh like alien tumors. He certainly fits into the film's production design, in the New Brutalist style that borrows the grimy industrial look from Fight Club and rummages through Paul Greengrass' Bourne movies for the attention-deficit editing and ShakyCam dialogue scenes.

The Real Death Race
Death Race seems just fine, in its churning turbo-tone, until you watch the film that inspired it. Death Race 2000 was a snarky exploitation film put out by Roger Corman's New World Pictures. The director was Paul Bartel, best known for his elegant horror comedies Private Parts and Eating Raoul. The script, from a story by Ib Melchior, was by two Corman stalwarts, Robert Thom (Wild in the Street, Bloody Mama) and Charles B. Griffith, the seminal creator of early Corman monsterpieces, from It Conquered the World to The Little Shop of Horrors. As has happened in other Corman remakes, like Little Shop of Horrors, the original writers and director receive no screen credit on the new Death Race; Corman considered them mere wage slaves in his cinematic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

The premise of both films is similar: In a fascist America of the near future, outlaws race funny cars to save or end their lives. But in the original the script is crazy-dark, the directorial mood way more larkish, free-wheeling, anarchic.

Consider the beginning: In the United Colonies of America, a high-school brass band bleats out The Star Spangled Banner as the nation's flag is raised, hundreds of red, white and blue balloons are released into the sky and a smiling onlooker waves a flag with a swastika emblazoned on it. The White House is now in Moscow, the President's "summer palace" in Peking. The Congress and the press are snugly in the Commander in Chief's pocket. We might be, not in the year 2000, but in autumn 2002, when official opposition to the impending Iraq invasion was mostly cowed into silence. Except that in the movie there is an insurgency, led by one Thomasina Paine, and it means to terminate the daredevil drivers, who are seen as the President's gladiators, their race a circus to anaesthetize the public.

Whereas the Anderson film is mostly confined, like the cons, to Terminal Island, Death Race 2000 travels from New York City (where the pedestrian traffic signs flash "WALK," then "RUN") to "New Los Angeles." And in contrast to the all-male gang in the new film, with the ladies reduced to riding shotgun, Bartel's drivers are equally split between men and women. David Carradine is Frankenstein, and a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone plays Machine Gun Joe, but there's also Warhol renegade Mary Woronov as Calamity Jane and Roberta Collins as Goth gal Mathilda the Hun. They are as aggressive as the guys, with Woronov's "Zany Janey" having depleted a stable of studs; and their subservient navigators are men.

Further, while Statham and his rivals could kill only one another, the drivers in Death Race 2000 can run up the score by knocking off pedestrians: 40 points for a teenager, 100 for anyone over 70. Frankenstein, whose lizard-green car sports fangs from its grille, is considered the good guy because, when he drives up to an old folks' home, he leaves the seniors alone and kills only a half-dozen doctors and nurses. In fact, Frank harbors his own insurrectionist tendencies. He's got an explosive embedded in his palm (it's not called a hand grenade for nothing), so that when he wins the race, and shakes hands with the President, there'll be a New World order — unless he's stopped by his navigator (Simone Griffeth), a secret spy for the insurgents.

From this brisk synopsis, you can tell that Death Race 2000 is far richer than the remake. Both have an attitude; the first one has a vision. George Miller testified that the Bartel film inspired his Mad Max movies: the post-apocalyptic landscape, the valuing of speed over life, the fender-level shots of cars careering toward Armageddon. It also spawned a rip-off video game, called Death Race, supposedly the first of its kind to be banned. Death Race 2000 didn,t slam into any legal walls, but it has a lunatic daring that was a hallmark of 70s movies, and that is all but absent from the films of the 00s.

"One of the things a low- or medium-budget filmmaker can do is experiment," Corman said in an interview with Leonard Maltin in the late 90s, "can take chances such as we did — in such a zany idea as Death Race — because you're not gambling that much money. If you're making a $100 million picture ... you,re going to be fairly conservative as to what you do. But if you're making a picture, say, in today's market for a million dollars, or when we made Death Race which I think was about $300,000, we can afford to, essentially, go crazy."

Who goes crazy today? Not the indie directors, crafting their pensive miniatures. Not the low-budget horror-meisters; their strategy of going-too-far has become an all-too-familiar destination. And certainly not the makers of big action films, as sleek and efficient and fun as they are. That's one of the limitations of machine entertainment like the Anderson Death Race. It can't break the mold it's cast in; it can reproduce only itself. It doesn't take the sublime risk that the audience will stare at the screen going "Huh?"— and, maybe later, get it and say "Aha!"

• Richard Corliss