Speed Racer opens with a shot of a boy, perhaps six years old, trapped in a school desk, anxiously tapping his foot while daydreaming of a racecar-inspired fantasyland. That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about this spastic display of multicolored auto-mania. The whole film has been designed to look like a Hello Kitty on bad acid — splashes and swirls of garish color fuel every frame — and all of it flies by with the painful rapidity of a machine gun. It’s not so much a movie as a barrage of computer-generated twitches stitched together for an audience that has trouble paying attention through an entire commercial.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ADVERTISEMENT
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Written and directed by the Wachowskis, the pair of weirdo wizard siblings (in case they cannot still be called “
brothers“) behind the
Matrix films,
Speed Racer takes its creators’ eccentric cinematic lineage and mauls it. In the first two
Matrix films, the Wachowskis demonstrated an uncanny visual sense, one that emphasized fluidity and motion over all else. People walked on walls, made multi-story leaps, and participated in gunfights choreographed as bullet-ridden ballets. It was comic-book violence reinvented as an elegant spectacle unbound by earthly limitations. There was a liberating spirit to those films; the Wachowskis approached physics as a curious three-year-old does his favorite playthings — through acts of creative disassembly. Mass, density, and gravity weren’t hard and fast rules to be obeyed so much as ideas to be deconstructed. The siblings gave the impression of speed by slowing things down, and in doing so, created some of the most impressive and memorable action set-pieces in cinematic history.
Their penchant for unrestrained acrobatics would seem to make the pair a perfect fit to adapt
Speed Racer, a hokey late-60s Japanese cartoon about a teenage racecar driver. Yet while the Wachowskis’ signatures are evident, they seemed to have learned all the wrong lessons from their previous work.
The
Matrix films doled out action scenes in graceful, mostly wordless environments, focusing on the interplay between the bodies on screen, and rarely cutting away from the action.
Speed Racer adopts a similarly casual attitude toward physics — the cars jump, wiggle, and flip, spinning around impossible corners and doing oh-wow loop-de-loops — and infuses it with a childish, bubblegum aesthetic.
But what ought to be delirious is, instead, disorienting. The Wachowskis barely have the patience to follow fully a single move, much less work through a full-length race sequence. Like its young protagonist, the film can barely sit still. It’s possible, I suppose, that the racing scenes here are just as stunning as anything they’ve done before, but the rhythm is so choppy, no one will ever be able to tell. Instead of staying locked on cars on the track, the film repeatedly cuts away to a slew of talking heads — track announcers and characters with vested interests in what’s going on — who narrate the action for the audience. Thus, what should come across as action-movie excitement becomes as thrilling as listening to the radio.
Not surprisingly, the story makes as much sense as the film’s physics, but is both less interesting and less consequential. Speed — yes, his name is really “Speed Racer” — proves adept at navigating his family’s car, the Mach 5, around the movie’s ludicrously designed race courses. Rather quickly, a giant corporation run by a man named Royalton (Roger Allam) decides it wants to sign him. But, aided by the masked and mysterious Racer X (
Lost’s Matthew Fox), it soon turns out that the corporation only means to use Speed and his family to boost their bottom line — and of course, a lot of loud and incoherent racing is required to once again set things aright.
