“We need a challenger.”

Drake’s rating: To anarchy and beyond!

Drake’s review: In the not-too-distant future, a factory town and the land surrounding it have been turned into a massive private prison complex housing over 400,000 inmates. With not much else to do except indulge in massive bouts of violence, the prisoners have set up the Death Race, a race around the complex in armed and armored vehicles. For reasons unexplained, the corporation running the prison has outlawed the race, which is certainly an interesting idea. After all, what are they going to do to offenders indulging in the race? Send them to more prison?

Still, the corporation, one Weyland International, has tasked the warden with ending the race once and for all, and he decides to go about it by sending in a SWAT team to kill the perpetual race winner, a masked man known only as Frankenstein. Unfortunately for the SWAT team, the prisoners get a pipeline of supplies from a man on the outside (Danny Trejo, Desperado) who runs a gambling empire based on the Death Race, and those supplies include guns. Lots of guns.

And also chainsaws. Turns out ballistic armor doesn’t really hold up against those.

So having tried the straight-forward way, the warden decides to sneak someone in the back door instead, and slips a Special Forces operative named Connor Gibson (Zach McGowan, Dracula Untold) in with the nest batch of arriving prisoners. Gibson, masquerading as another inmate, is supposed to get in, kill Frankenstein, and get out again. Sounds pretty simple, all things considered. Except for the fact that Frankenstein, as the Death Race champion, is the veritable ruler of the prison. And he’s undefeated in the Death Race, which is how Gibson must defeat him. And Frankenstein, despite spending his free time behind the wheel of a murder machine, is no dummy, and he suspects something is up with Gibson right off the bat.

I will admit to watching 2008’s Death Race, the erstwhile remake of the decidedly superior Death Race 2000, but I had entirely forgotten it*. In fact, I had to read Justin’s review of that movie to remember a single thing about it. This, despite the fact that I am, in Justin’s own words, part of the targeted demographic for that film: “the kind that likes fast cars and Stuff That Goes Boom.”

Happily, I will report that Death Race: Beyond Anarchy is not forgettable. Loud, yes. Derivative? Obviously. Entertaining? Of course! It has fast cars and Stuff That Goes Boom! One part Escape from New York, one part The Road Warrior and one part Rammstein concert, with just a dash of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre thrown in for good measure, Death Race: Beyond Anarchy starts off with things crashing and blowing up and ends the same way.

So does that make this a good movie? Oh, no. Of course not. Death Race: Beyond Anarchy is an unapologetically grimy little exploitation flick** that happily wallows around in its mud-filled pit and asks you if you want to jump into the deep end. If you do, you’re going to have a good time wallowing around as well. If you don’t, then get the heck out of there ASAP, because you’re going to get covered in grime regardless if you stick around too long.

I mean, I live for stuff like this, but I’m a professional Mutant Reviewer. Diving head first into the cinematic cesspool is just part of the job.

Still, I have to admit to a fondness for this one. It feels less like a modern effort and more like a better made throwback to all of those post-Mad Max action flicks that used to jam the shelves at your local video store. Fast, loud and violent, it’s like a concert by a local punk band that doesn’t have the musical chops to really make it, so they’re going to turn the volume all the way up and drown you in noise. It’s not a subtle trick, but it can be an effective one.

Featuring 100% less Statham than the first movie in this four(!) film series, Death Race: Beyond Anarchy is also about 95% better. And that 5% difference is only because Ian McShane was evidently in Death Race.

Not that I remember that, but IMDB swears it’s true.

*This is not unique to Death Race, as I pretty much forget every movie Jason Statham’s in. I call it Stathamnesia.

**And please note that I’m basing this on a review of the unrated version, which is very, very unrated.

Intermission!

• Unemployment at 21.6% Huh. This bleak near-future might be a little too on the nose.
• The warden looks like Seattle Seahawks GM John Schneider. Every time he’s on a phone in the movie, I’m expecting a draft call to be made.
• The prison has its own metal band! And decent audio equipment. Danny Trejo must be smuggling in Marshall amps as well as guns.
• Yeah, that hammer fight was only going to end one way.
• I have no idea how they talked Danny Glover into appearing in this, but he’s his usual fantastic self.
• Yeah, no. Don’t bring a Toyota Celica to a Death Race. That’s just not going to end well for you.
• I always love the scenes of frantic upshifting when the car is already at top speed. It’s like, “Dude! You’re already in top gear! There’s nowhere else to go!”
• There are some obvious references here. Weyland International of course feels like the predecessor to Alien’s Weyland-Yutani, and on one of the cars there’s a logo that says, “In Jail No One Can Hear You Scream.”
• There’s also the fact that Frankenstein refers to the prison complex as “the Sprawl,” a term coined by cyberpunk author William Gibson (from whom I’m assuming our lead character gets his surname).
• Although the main Death Race is saved for the end of the movie, rather than being stretched across the entire film like Death Race 2000, it still takes up a good 30 minutes of screen time and doesn’t feel tacked on. Plus the racers get nicknames and have unique looking cars. From what I remember of Death Race, everything kind of looked the same. Darn this Stathamnesia…