REVIEW: ‘Speed Racer’ (2008)

The first anime series to break into American television gets the glossy, live-action treatment from MATRIX trilogy mavens Andy and Larry Wachowski. The film attempts to capture the kinetic feel that made the original series such a hit. It’s a total sensory overload of garish primary colors, seizure-inducing editing and hyper-stylized action that may leave some begging for the relative calm of the action-packed MATRIX films.

Poorly juxtaposed with ridiculous racing action that largely looks like a glorified video game cut scene spliced together by first-year film students with ADD is a formulaic story of a young racer (Emile Hirsch) struggling to live up to his brother’s legacy while trying to protect his family from the corruption that exists in the racing world. The Wachowskis carry all the banal, soulless banter that sunk the latter half of MATRIX REVOLUTIONS into SPEED RACER while ramping up the unreal action to even less plausible extremes.

The film is more family friendly than the MATRIX films but only on the surface. Not surprising for the makers of BOUND, the story has a dark undercurrent that tends to drown out the relative wholesomeness of Speed and his family. Most of the comedy is centered on the hijinks of Speed’s kid brother Sparky (Kick Gurry) and his pet monkey. They’re actually the most entertaining characters in the movie.

SPEED RACER should have been a computer animated film produced by Pixar. The Wachowskis take their experience with bending reality in the MATRIX films and try to create a bright, live-action anime world and the results are hideous. An apt analogy is a car wreck. Production design reminds me of one of those lawns where you see pink flamingos, gnome statues and dozens of discarded toys lying about. Interiors look like leftovers from the FLINSTONES set by way of THE BRADY BUNCH, exterior backdrops look cut and paste, and race tracks look like mutated roller coaster tracks designed by Dali.

Direction and editing are uniformly horrid and once again reveal that the Wachowskis are masters of overstatement. They must have fallen in love with wipes because we see them every couple minutes, sometimes stacked on top of each other to create a hideous collage of yapping announcers and actors reactions. What’s even worse is the high-speed editing of all the action sequences. I thought TRANSFORMERS was bad but the racing scenes in SPEED RACER put those mech battles to shame. It’s like watching a two-hour movie trailer with nothing but barely comprehensible highlights. As far as the racing itself, it doesn’t even come close to the entertainment value of the pod race scene in STAR WARS: EPISODE I – THE PHANTOM MENACE. CGI cars bounce around unnaturally performing so many impossible stunts in unreal environments that the scenes completely lose their potential appeal. As punishment for their action filmmaking crimes, the Wachowski brothers need to be locked up in a room together with Michael Bay and forced to repeatedly watch GOODBYE, DRAGON INN.

A few token martial arts fights are thrown in. One involves a couple ninjas and the other is a highly-stylized battle between the whole Speed Racer team and thugs trying to put Speed out of commission during a cross-country rally. The choreography and editing here are adequate for a kids movie. The longer pitched melee has some nifty fantasy touches in how strikes are shown. It actually looked interesting and showed that the Wachowskis at least still have some new tricks when it comes to filming fight scenes.

None of the actors’ performances are memorable. John Goodman proves to be dependable as usual and Christina Ricci is looking good. Korean pop idol Rain makes his U.S. debut playing a racer who briefly teams up with Speed. He performs some unimpressive martial arts which doesn’t bode well for his upcoming NINJA ASSASSIN role. On the plus side, at least for the ladies, he gets bare-chested. Hiroyuki Sanada shows up in a couple scenes but does virtually nothing. I don’t even know why he’s in the movie. I wonder if more of his scenes were cut or if there was some kind of contractual agreement to get at least one famous Japanese actor in the cast.

I’m going to be blunt here. I really despised SPEED RACER. It’s the antithesis of what a good action movie should be, for families or otherwise. SPEED RACER fans may appreciate little details that the rest of us don’t. Young children may enjoy it but I’m not even sure it’s appropriate for them when a child character is flipping off an adult, moderate profanity is used and race scenes include rather ruthless violence. I vaguely recall that the original anime series had Speed running opponents off the track to blow up in a fiery death on occasion. They found a way to limit the body count in this film by having most characters safely eject from their destroyed vehicles. I just wish I could have found an eject button a lot sooner into the viewing.