Review: Speed Racer

The following is a reprint of my review of "Speed Racer", for the DePaulia, due to be published Friday:


By now, you probably know whether or not you’re going to see “Speed Racer”. The trailers have left no room for misconceptions, at any rate; the entire movie looks like the original Japanese cartoon of same name, if the Rainbow Road track from “Mario Kart 64” exploded all over it. My only request is that if you have already written this movie off, give it a chance.

I won’t spend a lot of time dissecting the plot, for there really isn’t much; the film follows the titular character (Emile Hirsch, as far from last year’s “Into The Wild” as he could possibly get) as he negotiates the treacherous world of racing, which here is the term for both organized racing (the courses for which look like something out of a Hot Wheels catalog) and the “seedy” world of rally racing (equally Hot Wheels-esque, but much more dangerous). With the help of his Mom and Pops (Susan Sarandon and John Goodman), along with his girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci), Speed does his best to overthrow the dishonest, cheater-favoring racing world with a mixture of hard work, ingenuity and the occasional dangerous driving maneuver.

The Wachowski brothers (the minds behind the “Matrix” trilogy) find great success here in what is, for them, a new arena: the family movie. They have, with this film, solidified their ability to create movies that seem to spring from feverish fantasies. With the “Matrix” films, they created the ultimate geek fantasy: an average guy who becomes a digital messiah by plugging into his computer. Here, they’ve managed to give vision to what every little kid who played with toy cars used to imagine: racing at impossibly high speeds while using tools and weapons that can exist only in the imagination.

In addition, the visuals themselves are stunning. For those trying to justify the idea that big screen movies will one day cease to exist, and can be replaced by an expensive home theater system, this is a compelling argument to the contrary. This is the very definition of eye candy, with fire engine reds, ocean blues and every other vibrant color imaginable onscreen, no matter how mundane the scene.

Many critics have lit into this movie on the grounds that it has a thin plot, undeveloped characters, exists only for little boys with no attention spans, and so on. This is the problem with most film critics; they spend so much time waiting for the next Significant Movie to come along that they refuse to take a film such as this as pure spectacle and fun. I would like to think that many of these critics, as kids, watched a movie like this, by way of “Star Wars” or some other summer epic of the recent past, and were blown away. The fact that they have since been inundated with the idea that “good films” cannot be like this is no excuse for losing that sense of wonder.

Is “Speed Racer” going to win any Oscars next year? Probably not. However, for what it is, it is a triumph.