“Speed Racer” crashes and burns! This car accident that passes for a movie is a disproportionate, hollow, horribly acted and just plain bizarre box office blight being steered directly at your small children.
And here’s the worst thing about the Wachowski Brothers’ feature adaptation of the cheesy animated series once loved by junior Generation X-ers: Today’s elementary school-aged kiddies will probably love it.
Yes, they’ll probably make you take them to see it. But be forewarned.
You may have to put themon a steady IV drip of anti-hyperactivity meds immediately after they’ve been exposed to the primary-colored, fast-motion excess where real human beings interact within what appears to be a bad CGI acid trip. And you may also have to banish them into an everlasting timeout after they inevitably start mimicking the film’s mugging moppet Spritle (Paulie Litt), the title protagonist’s little brother. This is a child character so offensively obnoxious, so beyond bratty, that even his pet chimpanzee Chim Chim seems the epitome of civilized restraint by comparison.
As written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, the edgy minds behind what became the increasingly unfathomable “Matrix” movies, their latest overwrought effort involves an auto-obsessed dude named Speed Racer — played by “Into the Wild’s” Emile Hirsch, obviously slumming for cash.
Speed sets out to defy the profit-seeking corporate villains who try to fix the outcomes in a major car racing league. Aided by his girlfriend (Christina Ricci) and parents (Susan Sarandon and John Goodman), our incorruptible hero hopes to qualify for and win the Grand Prix for pure love of the sport. A masked mystery figure named Racer X (Matthew Fox), who may or may not be Speed’s long lost older brother Rex, could help.
With its unassuming cartoon origins ignored and overinflated production appointments, “Speed Racer” brings to mind the Warren Beatty debacle “Dick Tracy.” And although it is designed as a PG-rated family film, with a simplistic plotline that can’t begin to sustain its two-hour plus running time, the English-accented bad guys are incongruously vicious and scary. They evoke the nightmarish “A Clockwork Orange” more than they do anything even remotely resembling the bare-bones humility of a low-tech old TV show.
But what can you say about a stilted, loud special effects expoitation with a random ape skipping through it? Fantasy racecars go “vroom” and a woozy film critic screams “Yuck.”
‘Speed Racer’
One Star
