Posted on Fri, May. 09, 2008

Film Review: Speed Racer

Frenzied 'Speed Racer' careens out of control.

By CHRISTOPHER KELLY

Star-Telegram Staff Writer

Lights flash, bells jangle, and the audience gets whomped and bludgeoned from every direction: If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to be a pinball in the moments before a full tilt, check out Speed Racer, Andy and Larry Wachowski’s big-screen reimagining of the 1960s Japanese anime series. For more than two hours, the Wachowskis flood the screen with unnaturally bright colors and ear-splitting noise, layering live-action atop animation atop still more live action. The movie looks like nothing you’ve seen before, and it induces an instant hangover. You don’t need sunglasses to make it to the end — you need two Valium.

What’s it all about? In a future world that might very well be the U.S., despite half the cast speaking with a British accent and seeming to have stumbled off the set of a drag-queen version of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, a young boy named Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch) dreams of following in his late brother Rex’s footsteps and taking the race-car industry by storm. Speed is certainly impressive behind the wheel, so much so that the powerful head of a racing conglomerate, Royalton (Roger Allam), wants to recruit him. But Speed -- along with his independent-minded father (John Goodman); his doting mother (Susan Sarandon); his loving girlfriend (Christina Ricci); his younger brother, Spritle (Paulie Litt); and Spritle’s pet chimpanzee, Chim Chim -- has a natural aversion to corporate sponsorships. He refuses to join Royalton’s team, an act of resistance that sets off an elaborate chain of events and eventually uncovers a vast corruption ring that threatens to cripple the entire racing industry.

Or at least that’s as much as I could figure out, before my brain -- to protect further cells from being damaged -- went into hibernation mode. At various points in Speed Racer, we meet a gang of east London thugs who travel in the bed of an 18-wheeler; a Japanese ninja who threatens to inject our hero with a paralyzing poison; a mysterious quasi-superhero named Racer X (Lost's Matthew Fox), who may or may not be Speed's deceased brother; and -- I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried -- Shaft’s Richard Roundtree, who plays the legendary racer Ben Burns, whose iconic victory at the Grand Prix decades earlier may or may not have been rigged.

Pitching their wares squarely to the fanboys in the crowd, the Wachowskis (who also wrote the screenplay) seem to have decided to cram as many motifs from the original series into one elaborately tricked-out package. But from almost the first moment, the digital effects overwhelm the storytelling — we wouldn’t care about following the plot even if we could. Obsessed with creating a live-action corollary to Japanese anime, the Wachowskis place characters in the immediate foreground, while behind them a series of images unfold, rear projection-style. It’s an orgy of green screen technology — and it results in some very striking tableaux, with flashbacks and flash-forwards and parallel action all unfolding at the same time.

But while Speed Racer -- which uses a color palette that makes you think a gumball machine has exploded inside the projection booth -- can often be very entrancing to watch, it's not that entrancing. It's like a modern-art installation piece -- after about two minutes, you're ready to move on to the next gallery. Our sense of cabin fever is only heightened by the pace of the movie, which is alternately jittery and tedious: In between cartoonish kiddie hijinks involving the chimpanzee and the rules-breaking Spritle, we’re treated to endless racing sequences, in which the cars traverse sand, ice, sky and even loop-the-loops. (These latter scenes, which are mostly computer-animated, have all the charm and entertainment value of being invited over to a friend’s house and asked to sit politely while he demonstrates his new PlayStation.)

Forced to generate emotion out of thin air, the actors all look befuddled and/or completely overwhelmed; in some scenes, Hirsch doesn’t even seem to know in what direction he’s supposed to be looking. After about 90 minutes, the movie has turned so loud and exhausting that the only thing you can do is sink into your seat and wait until the feelings of nausea have passed. What makes this all the more disappointing is that the Wachowskis started out so promisingly, with the tightly wound same-sex thriller Bound and then the entertainingly elastic and mysterious The Matrix. They truly seemed like the first filmmakers of their generation who could make the virtual realm pulse with life.

But as they showed in their incomprehensible Matrix sequels, they've become consumed by arcana and trivia; and they've become slaves to the very technology they once wielded so masterfully. Indeed, for long and frenetic stretches, Speed Racer feels so cold, so alien, so utterly divorced from humanity that you start to wonder if the directors have left their editing suite at any point in the past five years. These would-be revolutionaries are officially wearing no clothes.