If the Fast and Furious movies are the cool jocks who get good grades and homecoming honors, then the Death Race films, Universal’s other gas-powered cash cow, are the near-invisible stoner kids who spend breaks between classes smoking outside. And this one, Death Race: Beyond Anarchy, tries so little, he flunks woodshop.
In this fourth and fetid entry, the titular competition now takes place within the walls of The Sprawl, an 88,000-acre home to 220,000 hardened criminals. You do the math (because the target audience sure can’t). Metal-masked Frankenstein (Velislav Pavlov, Lake Placid vs. Anaconda) may be the prison sport’s reigning hero, but he’s no longer our main character — hell, he’s no longer the good guy, which seems pretty counterproductive, but whatev. That task falls to a not-up-to-it Zach McGowan (Dracula Untold) as Connor Gibson, a black-ops specialist sent undercover to take down Frankenstein and the race. This requires Connor to earn a contestant’s slot via a preliminary game of Capture the Keys, whose officials do not want “to see some MMA-submission bullshit.”
Fans of the previous Death Race pictures are bound to express disappointment with where director Don Michael Paul (Half Past Dead) and co-writer Tony Giglio (S.W.A.T.: Under Siege) take their first turn at the direct-to-video franchise’s wheel: to something resembling fanfic, built upon the visual equivalent of STDs and self-pleasing dialogue like “Well, ain’t this a rainbow of fuckin’ ugly?” So skeevy and scuzzy is this “effort” that the returning character played by Danny Trejo (L.A. Slasher) appears to want little to do with it, spending most of his runtime literally watching the action from bed!
Early in, someone remarks that it doesn’t matter who’s behind Frankenstein’s mask, because duh, it’s a mask. However, Paul proves that theory untrue — Luke Goss, we hardly knew ye! — and not just because the mask looks positively Predatory this time around. The previous entries may be junk, but they are fun junk; this grimy, slimy one forgets and/or forgoes the fun. In its place? Decapitations, misogyny, face piercings, sub-Slipknot metal, Purge-level beatdowns, talk of taxes, more misogyny, dramatic rain fighting, Danny Glover, motocross, ziplining and some MMA-submission bullshit. —Rod Lott