Last night, I told my wife I was sick of watching weather news as Hurricane Gustav slowly crept toward the direction of where I live on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I needed to get out of the house, and thought a movie would make for a nice distraction. I wanted to see something loud and crazy that would keep my mind off storm surges and wind damage, and I thought Death Race would be a great choice. Although it wasn’t anything spectacular, I found it to be very entertaining.

I have seen the original Death Race 2000 and this movie is nothing like it, other than the main driver wearing a mask. In this movie, the Death Race takes place inside a prison and they charge a pretty high amount for people to have online access to all the cameras mounted around the race. It never really gets into the legality of such a thing, because that would require too much forethought and the target audience for PG-13 movies like this don’t want to watch such boring complications. Basically, hardened criminals can win their freedom by racing cars armed with machine guns and other weapons.

The jail warden, played in a completely Hitler-like evil fashion by Joan Allen, is a profiteering psychopath who runs the race with all kinds of aces up her sleeve. She is so desperate to increase her viewership that she has an honest man’s (Jason Statham) wife killed just so he could be framed for the murder and placed in her prison. She then taunts him with pictures of his young daughter and offers him the chance to be with her again if he participates in the race and wins. You see, he’s got some past experience in the race car circuit.

This is one of those movies where everything is laid out clearly in front of you in the first fifteen minutes. You know who is bad and who is good, and you can just about pick which racers will die in which order just by the amount of screen time they get before the race starts. Hell, even the trailers shows you almost the whole movie, including the last few minutes that really are a major spoiler. I hate it when they do that. Don’t show the ending in the preview! Did the marketing team behind this movie go to Ole Miss or something?

The race takes place in three stages, so about an hour of this 90 minute movie is devoted to the race scenes, which are really good. The rest of it is all that lame old dialogue and character development stuff that bores the kiddies in between the race scenes. You know how it goes. This movie was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who has made a career of making very average PG-13 science fiction action movies like Aliens vs. Predator and Resident Evil.

Jason Statham makes this movie worth watching, plus the action scenes are really good. It reminded a lot of a Mad Max movie because of the thrown together way in which the vehicles were built, plus they had some very cool weapons. I’ve always liked video games where you could race cars and shoot at or blow up the other drivers, so naturally I got a kick out of this movie. Although a lot of it is shot in close-up and overuses the whole ‘shaky camera’ thing, it still manages to show off some good stunts and explosions.

Despite numerous plot holes and basically not making a lot of sense, Death Race is still an entertaining action movie. It’s so crazy and over the top with the storyline and violence that you can’t help but forgive its many flaws. Compared to the cheesy 70’s film that inspired this remake, it’s a work of genius.