Whoa, Speed Racer, Whoa.
By Nick Manteris · 0 Comments · Leave a Comment
The critics just about all agree that this movie sucks, but, frankly, they’re wrong. Ever since the Matrix trilogy didn’t end the way that everyone wanted, the Wachowski brothers have been the filmmakers that people love to hate. Not everything that they try to do is a success and the anti-corporate storyline is a bit basic, but Speed Racer is still an important cinematic achievement that deserves some credit. Instead, it’s been a complete failure at the box office and the worldwide gross to date is still only two-thirds of the budget. The main reason it’s done so terribly is because it is one of those strange projects without an audience. Another recent film that had with the same problem was Underdog, so it could be just a symptom of the source material. Both started as cartoons in the sixties and the studios probably wanted to reach the children of the original fans of each series, but it seemed like Speed Racer was marketed towards adults and Underdog, with the exception of the name, was almost completely unrecognizable.
In the interest of full disclosure I must explain that I have been a Speed Racer fan almost all of my life. The first toys I remember playing with as a child were a plastic Mach Five and a Fisher-Price circus train set. I remember coming home after school to watch Speed Racer when Channel 20 first started in the early Eighties. I also remember thinking that the cartoon didn’t really hold up too well nearly ten years later when MTV started playing it, but I that didn’t stop me from buying the toy that was released a few years after that. When the movie was announced it was a bit disappointing to find out that it was going to be live-action instead of animation, and learning that the Wachowski brothers were attached to the project didn’t really help because I wasn’t interested in a kid-friendly film from them. I felt I had an obligation to see it based on my childhood experiences, but my interest was fairly low and I really didn’t really think I would like it much. Thankfully, I was wrong.
There has never been anything like Speed Racer before. The Wachowskis have combined an innovative method of storytelling with their hyper-realistic visual style to create a movie for children that still retains some intelligence. The most unexpected and refreshing aspect of the film was how they manipulated the sense of time… cleverly inserting flashbacks and flashforwards into the story (sometimes in the middle of a conversation!) in a way that didn’t alter the pace or the feel. The spoiler-averse might want to skip this summary of the first 15 minutes: As a child Speed only seems to be able to think about racing and constantly daydreams during class. When school gets out, he convinces his older brother Rex, whom he believes is the best racer in the world, to teach him how to race. The special cars that they drive on impossible courses can jump, drift and slide and keep the drivers safe if there is an accident. Speed’s dad quit his job at a big motor company in order to build these racecars. The first time Speed notices Trixie he stops thinking about racing and that becomes the reason that they meet. Trixie likes excitement and has a thing for Speed that started even before they met. Rex set a track record, became a target to the crooked racers in the circuit and left home to keep his family out of danger. He then becomes one of the dirtiest drivers in the world before getting killed in a cross-country race. This information is not only presented before the first race is completed, it’s presented during the first race. There is a complexity of narrative here that that seems to be completely overlooked. The last storytelling trick this impressive was from the movie Serenity: The first sequence started with some back-story exposition in a dream before switching to the girl that was having the dream trying to escape from some kind of test facility with another character and then finally revealed that the escape was a holographic recording being viewed by a completely different character. 
Unfortunately, the drawback of cramming so much story into such a small amount of screen time is that when the amount of information falls below a certain threshold the film will appear to slow down… and not even a ninja attack and a dangerous cross-country race can save you at that point. While we’re on the subject of ninja attacks, I have to acknowledge the homage to Danger: Diabolik (or was it the Body Movin’ video?) and the poison trick they borrowed from You Only Live Twice. The zoetrope-style galloping zebra that appears on the walls in the final race is another really nice touch and the artificial digitally manufactured world reminded me of something that Tim Burton might create for one of his happier projects. Not every moment was positive... the final race may have been specifically designed to induce epileptic fits in non-epileptics, many of the transitions were a bit jarring and a couple moments during the races destroyed my ability to suspend disbelief, but overall I think it worked.
- Score
- 7/10
And my criticism will surely be incomplete without mentioning, in one sentence, a few of the things you might encounter in the other reviews of this film: Apparently a movie that looks like a video game can crash and burn in the theaters even when it’s filled with eye candy and the only thing left to mention about this day-glo, candy-colored film might be Christina Ricci's eyes… which are perfectly suited for a live-action anime.
