HOT ON THE HEELS of the first blockbuster of the Summer season (Iron Man) we have its first bomb: Speed Racer, the $120 million Wachowski Brothers production, grossed only $18.5 million in its first weekend. Reviewers were no kinder than the audience: It rates only 36 percent “fresh” on the critic-aggregating website Rotten Tomatoes.

In every way, Speed Racer is a failure: Critically, commercially, and artistically, it’s a giant Day Glo-colored mess. It assaults the senses without relent, subjecting its audience to burning-bright neons on top of computer-generated backgrounds while the actors ham it up. The plot is both bombastic and befuddling–a fiery business mogul by the name of Royalton organizes a worldwide conspiracy to fix stock car races in the hope of manipulating stock prices–but plenty of bad movies with silly plots make money. So how did the Wachowskis manage to fail so spectacularly?