Movie Notes: Speed Racer

October 26th, 2009

Speed Racer

= 1 star

Starring Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, John Goodman
Directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski

Synopsis

Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch) belongs to a family with racing in its blood, which comes in handy when he wants to end a conspiracy of cheating drivers.

The Good

Ambitious in bringing anime / manga style to the screen, with bright day glow colors, fast and furious cuts, and framing characters in stylized profile or front views while backgrounds shift behind.
Will surely be loved by video game and cartoon obsessed kids under the age of ten, although I’d personally consider this a sign of irreparable brain damage.

The Bad

I got a headache after a mere ten minutes of soaking in this CGI cartoon world. There’s literally too much crap going on, making it difficult to concentrate on the story, and characters often look like they’re before a green screen with no effort made to blend them into the CGI environments. I found the end result often confusing, disjointed, and mind numbing.
I can’t say any of the elsewhere excellent actors – Emile Hirsch, Susan Sarandon, Christina Ricci – get any chance to act, beyond very stylized facial expressions. They are literally overwhelmed by the optical distraction going on around them. The only ones who manage to transcend the nutty world is the younger brother and the chimpanzee, because their slapstick comic relief is goofier and frantic enough to break through the garish visuals.
No sense of danger or tension during the car chases, since it all looked fake.

Conclusion

It’s an understatement to say I didn’t get this movie. If you thought George Lucas overdid it with the CGI pod race in The Phantom Menace – well, this is even worse.

Speed Racer is like Transformers, Dick Tracy, and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory Antares-auto-tuned into over-compressed pop music blaring on 11 until I had to shut it off. It’s nearly the polar opposite of everything I consider a satisfying movie. If you’re over ten with even a limited ability to appreciate subtlety: skip it.

IMDB: Speed Racer
Wikipedia: Speed Racer
Rotten Tomatoes: Speed Racer 36%