Race car driver Jensen Ames (Jason Statham) is framed for murder in Death Race.

Universal pictures

Death Race is pretty much what you might expect from a movie set in the near future in a prison where the warden stages roar-to-the-death races by desperate prisoners in souped-up cars, watched by a bored public on the Internet, the last refuge for lonely, scarily desperate people.

It’s 2012 and the U.S. economy has collapsed (gee, do you think it will take that long?) and the prisons, now run by outside corporations looking for profits, are filled. Warden Hennessey (Joan Allen) finds the key to profits with her Death Race games, the ultimate winner receiving a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Lucky for her that former racing car great Jensen Ames (Jason Statham of the Transporter movies) has been framed for murder and brought to her Terminal Island prison where, unlucky for him, he undergoes severe beatings by the sadistic guards, and takes part in a mess hall fight after a fellow inmate drools on his mashed potatoes. In Jensen, Hennessey sees a chance to revive the sagging ratings of Death Race. Using as bait the future well-being of Jensen’s young daughter, who is about to be put up for adoption on the outside, Hennessey cajoles him into putting on the mask of Death Race’s most popular driver, the one known as Frankenstein. That masked driver died in a car wreck, although the public doesn’t know it. Even though it’s Jensen under Frankenstein’s mask, people will think it’s their old favorite.

Set in an island prison that looks like a clump of warehouses (actually buildings in the port of Montreal) and photographed in a relentless gray, the overall tone of Death Race is hopeless glumness, mirrored in Statham’s determinedly grim performance.

A series of races are staged for maximum explosive impact by writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson (Mortal Kombat Resident Evil), as a number of the challengers end up in wrecks, all building up to the inevitable final confrontation between Jensen/Frankenstein and Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson, matching Statham grimace for grimace). Because the film depends more on mechanics than character building, most of the challengers are anonymously interchangeable. There’s one minor surprise along the way, other than seeing Joan Allen as the warden. But mostly this is by-the-numbers moviemaking. Allen, nominated three times for Academy Awards and most recently working in Rhode Island opposite Richard Gere in Hachiko: A Dog’s Story, must have done this one for the paycheck.

But 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. Frankenstein’s Monster is a 2006 Ford Mustang GT with machine guns on the hood. Machine Gun Joe’s is a 2004 Dodge Ram 1500 4WD with a snowplow contraption welded onto its front end. Others include a 1966 Buick Riviera, a 1989 Jaguar XJS, a 1971 Buick Riviera boat tail and a 1978 Porsche 911 fitted with four rockets over the rear window. It’s the cars that will draw racing fans.

Death Race is actually a reworking of producer Roger Corman’s low-rent 1975 sci-fi hit Death Race 2000, which co-starred David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone, pre-Rocky. That film was a tongue-in-cheek goof about a cross-country race in which drivers scored points by killing pedestrians. Death Race, unfortunately, is played grimly straight.

**Death Race

Starring: Jason Statham, Joan Allen, Ian McShane, Tyrese Gibson, Natalie Martinez.

Rated: R, contains graphic violence, profanity.

mjanuson@projo.com