Racing in cars toward death

The Daily is on a pretty massive indie trip right now. Sorry to have blown your minds like that, but I just couldn’t let the lies stand any longer. Face it: the good ole’ days of single-page sports stats are long gone, and with them, our editors’ sense of obligation to all of us still swimming in the mainstream.

Again, sorry for having knocked all of you off your chairs, but in all seriousness, it’s not as though the editors were doing a great job of hiding it either. I mean, have any of you even heard of a single movie that’s been reviewed in The Daily since you started reading it? And before you answer, morally ambiguous, cultural-relativist foreign love epics don’t count.

Regardless, there’s no denying that most students my age walk into theatres expecting nothing more than the honest pleasures of car explosions, shitty one-liners, and Jason Statham ass-shots. And of course not a single one of them actually reads The Daily, but they nevertheless are contributing a negligible sum of money to this good paper’s operations, and thus expect – nay, deserve to be catered to.

Thus comes Death Race, spraying mace in the face of every single film scholar in history; sticking rods in the gears of all those who wouldn’t watch anything they couldn’t call a film; and, most significantly, reviving exuberant vehicular pornography as an art form movie execs can no longer continue to ignore.

The movie wastes no time – its TTCE (Time-To-Car-Explosion) falling squarely under the five-minute mark. Elegant and aerodynamic, shedding all of its obligations to logic and decency, it concentrates on the things that matter: post-hoc replays of each character’s gruesome death, passing mentions to the villain’s homosexuality, straight-faced paeans to gender inequality, etc.

But somewhere along the way, the movie spirals out of control, leaving the brain-atrophied viewers dazed, paralyzed. But make no mistake – it’s all for the best. In the face of Death Race’s virtuosic command of impressionistic imagery, sense would only serve to kill its unflappable momentum. And should you be so benevolent as to trust Death Race, and let the film do what it does best, the resulting experience hits something like fecal play during intercourse – a vicious assault on all the senses, but intensely appealing to the undomesticated wolf-man in all of us.

At 105 minutes long, the movie ends all too soon. Still, a sense of puzzlement lingers past its running time, as a single, vital question remains unanswered: “How much fucking money did this fucking movie cost? And how many endangered species could we have saved with this money?”

A fair query, to be sure, but – honestly – you’re all looking at it the wrong way. Instead, think of how much these movies make, and how many starving kids we could feed with that money. You heard it here first, folks: Death Race – bringing the developing world back from the brink. The future is finally here!