ItÁ¢€â„¢s not the Day-Glo tones (an elaboration on the primary-colors scheme of 1990’s Dick Tracy) or the digitization thatÁ¢€â„¢s at fault but the relentless need to hype everything into absurdity. But they go straight to movie jail for not making the races believable in the slightest Á¢€” the one off-track scramble is the only one to set the spine tingling a little. The Wachowskis get a citizenship medal for not killing off any drivers in the course of the story when the cars explode, the occupants are instantly encased in bouncing foam bubbles and sent packing. I canÁ¢€â„¢t think of a really satisfying feature film about racers, and this one is too eccentric to qualify. Confession: While I like a good car chase in a movie, car racing as a subject doesnÁ¢€â„¢t get my engine racing. We hear a lot about the wonder and majesty of racing. ![]() ![]() The machinations of the tycoon Royalton (Roger Allam), who demands that Speed race for him, is the other monkey wrench, and as you have already guessed the two are related. Everything is pretty much hunky-dory with Speed and his poor but honest racing family, except for the long shadow cast by the mysterious death of his brother, Rex. He has a hot but chaste girlfriend, Trixie (Christina Ricci, who has held out long enough to earn grown-up paydays), and true-blue parents, played with warmth and stolidity by John Goodman and Susan Sarandon, troopers who have built up sufficient gravitas to register as human against shifting multicolored backgrounds. The part consists entirely of being determined but pleasant while being green-screened and CGI’d into various made-up vehicles. The effort gives one-dimensional cartoon characters maybe a quarter-dimension more.Įmile Hirsch, yet another promising young talent fast-tracked for franchises and action figures (canÁ¢€â„¢t they hold out a little longer?), plays Speed. What the brothers have done is build it in, laboriously, tediously. (Á¢€Å“Just two hours if you leave right when the closing credits begin,Á¢€ said the press rep, trying to be helpful.) If I were planning a Speed Racer movie, it would run 90 minutes, tops Á¢€” thereÁ¢€â„¢s no subtext to explore. That the family trade was not going to get the WachowskisÁ¢€â„¢ undivided attention was also apparent from the invite, which revealed a running time of 135 minutes. ![]() So is this one, when it forgets to be a PG movie for the family, which is often enough. V for Vendetta (2006), which they pulled the strings on, was a mess of totalitarian clichÁƒ©s and good intentions. They needed to go back to something smaller, more intimate, maybe with Gina Gershon again playing a lesbian (itÁ¢€â„¢s just a thought), as in their debut feature, Bound (1996). This was not the film the Wachowski Brothers needed to rebound with after the embarrassment of the Matrix sequels (2003). There are two movies going on here, neither with crossover appeal. The goofiest thing about this perplexing enterprise is that itÁ¢€â„¢s only sort of for the over-sevens the boring parts (and there are a lot of boring parts) are for the 40-year-olds lugging their over-sevens into the theater for this weekÁ¢€â„¢s cinematic adrenaline rush. Given previews that promised candy-colored joyrides on green-screened Hot Wheels tracks, I thought it should be mandatory to bring one. The Speed Racer invite for the press screening said that children over seven would be welcome to attend. Some 40 years later I wouldn’t have imagined it as a potential new franchise for the makers of The Matrix (1999) to put on the road, but then again I was the guy who said todayÁ¢€â„¢s savvy, Wii-playing kids would never, ever go for Alvin and the Chipmunks. ![]() There wasnÁ¢€â„¢t much to it Á¢€” there was a car, a monkey, a bad guy, and once I had my sugar rush I was outta there, its theme song lodged in a tiny corner of my mind. All I know about Speed Racer I learned as a kid, when I watched episodes of the proto-anime between spoonfuls of Cocoa Puffs.
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