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| Speed Racer |
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  (1/10)
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Runtime: 129 |
| Public Rating: 0.00 (0 votes) |
Director: Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: action, adventure, comedy, sport |
Year: 2008 |
| Writer(s): Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski |
| Distributor: Warner Brothers |
| Reviewed by: LaRae Meadows |
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Speed Racer, the popular cartoon, races his way onto the big screen. Speed Racer is a fantastical, whirling, spinning, psychedelic abomination with almost no plot, horrific sets and one-liners that would be rejected by Laffy Taffy.
Speed Racer (Young: Nicholas Elia, Old: Emile Hirsch) grew up wanting to race cars and looking up to his racecar driving brother, Rex Racer (Scott Porter). At the first chance he got, Speed became a professional race car driver. Heading up the crew is Pops (John Goodman), Speed and Rex’s father. Rex is tempted by money to leave his father’s team and live the life of luxury by joining a larger racing team.
My husband and I have been playing a free race car game called TrackMania. We’ve become addicted. You fly off ramps, go upside down and avoid obstacles. It is fun because it is just realistic enough to be believable but novel enough to be fun. Movies have to find that same mix of novel and realistic. Andy and Larry Wachowski mix Speed Racer as well chlorine and ammonia go together (look it up).
Green screens are a double edged sword. Green screens can offer us a world of altered physics and take the audience to worlds we would never see. Green screens are also cheaper, in many cases, than building a set, so directors like the Wachowski Brothers use it when they should be building proper sets. The pseudo sets, as I call them, are a horrific cinematic malformation. The wash of spinning colors are newfangled but there is nothing familiar about them, so they are hard to wrap your mind around. When the track looks like the best driver would end up dead on their first go round, there is no way to suspend your disbelief long enough to choke down the abysmal dialogue.
Speed Racer is one of the most impeccable examples of why the writer and director should not be the same people. If there had been a proper writer or director, someone probably would have noticed there is only a Saturday morning cartoon episode amount of plot, taffy-pulled to 129 minutes. The plot, which was so horrible, is challenging for me to summarize, was only slightly more complicated than creative writing projects completed by seven year olds in Ms. Smith’s second grade English as a second language class. I guess the Wachowski brothers thought if they threw the vomitous dialogue between infinite montages, we might not notice the bad taste in our mouths.
If a wise audience member left the theater to go get popcorn, a soda, make a pot roast and give birth to triplets, they would return during the same racing sequence. After twenty minutes there was no plot progression, and we hadn’t met most of the characters. Most of what we saw was Emile Hirsch in his car as the green screen spins a Spirograph race car track behind him.
There was one funny line in all of Speed Racer, delivered by John Goodman. “It’s terrible what passes for a ninja these days.” That is funny, even out of context.
Speed Racer is a live action cartoon, with all the quality visuals and writing. Instead of watching this AV Club whack off, stay home, play TrackMania and drop some acid. It will have the exact same affect on your brain.
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