In the year 2008, it would be fair to state that Jason Statham is the posterboy for the badboy action hero. And despite a recent turn towards the more dramatic in this spring's The Bank Job, Death Race pretty much gets him back on track.

No question about it, Death Race is an action movie. It takes place in a futuristic prison system run for profit by private enterprises. Save for a small handful of characters, almost all of the movie's characters are inmates of Terminal Island prison. And in the life-sentence episode we tune into, the event of the decade is Death Race, an extreme car race in which prisoners are given the chance to win their freedom or die trying, and audiences are allowed the entertainment privilege of watching it all go down.

Without even delving into the more specific story that drives the movie, the concept of Death Race is one that can't help but raise a few questions. First and foremost, how could such a "game" actually come into existence? How could one woman (Joan Allen's Warden Hennessey) be permitted to possess such power over others' lives? And perhaps the closest to home, what sort of world is it where millions of people would tune in to watch such a celebration of death and violence?

As much as I would like to say not this one, the truth is that I don't know how far off our world actually is from allowing such a thing like Death Race to happen. Sure, we may not televise executions. But we sure are fascinated by fictional murder. We may turn our heads away from the nightly news account of yesterday's shooting. But our eyes will be glued to the TV when professional athletes beat each other to near-death for sport. And there are few of us who would ever admit that we find the demise of criminals to be somehow personally fulfilling. But the fact that COPS has remained a hit show for nearly 20 years seems to say otherwise.

And then there is the race's promise of freedom. Although the race's marketing tactics and streaming numbers point directly towards violence as its main selling point, throughout the movie, the fact that the men are actually racing for their freedom is one that comes up time and time again. Warden Hennessey repeatedly appeals to the quest for freedom to almost sugarcoat the gruesome display Death Race actually is. When she recruits Jensen Ames (Statham) to take the place of her legendary driver Frankenstein, she tells him, "I'm offering your freedom, Mr. Ames. If that's not worth risking your life for, what is?" Talking about Frankenstein, she tells Ames that, he "moves them, inspires them, and in this world that's not easy to come by." And before the race's most critical stage, she literally tells the men they are now heroes of the very world that kicked them out, the very world that is now all watching them.

As Hennessey tells Ames, if there is any fight worth dying for, freedom would be it. But as far as criminals killing each other for freedom that we all pretty much know they will never be given, I'm sorry, but inspirational is the last word I would use to describe that. And men who kill others in pursuit of their own triumph are not the kind of men I would ever call my heroes.

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