Universal Pictures

You've got to admire a movie that gets right to the point. The title is Death Race, and the first sound you hear is squealing tires. You see fights and car crashes and dead people before the credits start to roll.

A crash-course in future history explains that the year is 2012 and in typical dystopian fashion, everything is horrible. The economy has tanked, crime has surged, and private corporations now run the country's overstuffed prisons. Terminal Island is where the "worst of the worst" are warehoused and where its entrepreneurial warden, Hennessey (Joan Allen), has turned the prison into a profit center by recasting it as a virtual coliseum, broadcasting brutal death races on the Internet as pay-per-view online events.

Writer and director Paul W.S. Anderson keeps his foot on the accelerator as he races through the bare minimum of exposition necessary to get the show on the road. So we see happy-but-unemployed iron worker Jensen Ames (Jason Statham) come home to his loving wife and beautiful baby and, within a few seconds, his wife is dead, he's framed for the murder, and he's in front of the stone-faced warden at Terminal Island. Turns out Ames was a hotshot driver in a previous life, and the warden needs him to take the place of her ratings-grabbing racer, Frankenstein. He always wears a mask, since he's so battle-scarred, so no one will notice when Ames takes his place.

Universal Pictures

Actor Jason Statham in a scene from the movie "Death Race."

With that, we're ready to rumble. Death Race makes no pretense of being anything but what it is: a boom-pow-splat thrill ride. And as that, it works, quite well actually. It's got just enough smarts to keep it from sinking under the weight of its own cheesiness. The satirical edge with which it presents its extreme entertainment extravaganza allows Death Race to present a near-future spectacle that is both ludicrous and plausible. As the over-amped announcers rattle off the drivers' names (Reaper, 14K, Machine Gun Joe) and kill stats, the present-day parallels with wrestling and NASCAR are hard to miss.

And the movie provides just enough story details and tension to raise the stakes and keep things moving along. Ames wants to avenge his wife's murder and get his daughter back, the prison's corrupt money-making scheme has to be brought down and so on. But, seriously, who cares about any of that. Let's just get back to cars and guns and crashes, which the movie does with a vengeance.

With a rocking, raging soundtrack blasting, the numerous race sequences are, in a word, cool. Like a 21st-century-industrial take on the chariot races in Ben Hur, the armored cars go round and round with guns blazing and fireballs billowing. In this, the movie gets its own Mad Max mojo working, but there's no real attempt at social commentary here – these churls just want to have fun. Admittedly, it's violent and often bloody fun, but the movie always finds ways to make it clear that none of this is intended to be taken seriously. Aiding greatly in this is the hilariously stone-faced performance of Ian McShane, who as "Coach," the prison's master mechanic, walks about offering wry and sagacious sound bites. Ditto the presence of three-time Academy Award nominee Ms. Allen. With her white-faced make-up and kewpie-doll lipstick, she looks like the headmistress in a silent movie, so prim and proper. And then all of a sudden, the most absurd profanities pop out of her.