Speed Racer

A certain friend of mine had told me several times several times that she loved the film Speed Racer, and I had ridiculed her for it. But given the fact that I had never actually watched the movie I had no right to judge, so I decided to actually watch the film. And when I did it suprised me. Although not by it's quality, but by how absolutly horrible it was.

Speed Racer is a reboot of the 1960 anime show of the same name, written and directed by the Wachowski brothers. The film follows Speed Racer (yes, that's actually his full name), played by Emile Hirshe, a teenager who loves racing and his family. However racing is shown to be extremely corrupt, and it follows Speed Racer's journey to win the Grand Prix without becoming corrupt himself. Now just by hearing the plot you would think that it's very simple and easy to follow. However I was completly unable to follow a large amount of what was happening. The movie is filled with unnessasary dialouge about the buisness of racing that's loaded with subtext that I was complelty unable to pick up on. I'm saying this as someone who had no trouble following Inception and Memento, and this is a movie made for little kids!

And that brings me to my second point, which is that if you are over the age of ten it's impossible to enjoy this movie. About a good third of the film is spent on horribly unfunny slapstick between Speed's chubby little brother and his monkey. Even in the relativly serious race sequences they find some way to work them in. Unlike charming comic distractions like Dug in Pixar's Up, they're obnoxious and dumb and ruin the chance of any adult enjoying the film. I thought I would never say this, but they're worse than Jar-Jar.

Another problem I have with the film is the use of special effects. The purpose of the film is to be a live-action cartoon, so everything but the actors is CG. Everything is extremely colorful and over the top, and it had the potential to be extremely cool and artsy. However they attempt a degree of realism, and it puts all the scenes in this ackward looking middle ground that causes everything to look cheap and bad.
Speaking of things that are cheap and bad, lets talk about the script. I think it speaks for itself so I'll dicate to you a conversation between two characters after a ninja attack.
Trixe: Oh my god, was that a Ninja?
Pops: More like a non-ja. Terrible what passes for a ninja these days.
Trixe: Cool beans!
It tries so hard to be ironically retro, but because it tries so hard we end up laughing at them rather than with them. Also there isn't a single character in this movie that has an ounce of dimention to them. Speed is the good guy and is always incredibly good, the bad guy is always incredibly evil and has no real motivation.

Finally there's the acting which contains some of the only redeeming qualities of the film. Emile Hirshe is excellent (although he makes some really ridiculous faces during the racing scenes) and so is John Goodman and their scenes together provide some of the only honest material in the entire film. But the acting also provides some negative elements, mainly Matthew Fox as Racer X. I love Matthew Fox on Lost and I think he deserves the Emmy, but he simply cannot play the tough guy and his acting in this movie is laughably bad. On the brightside though they were considering Keanu Reeves for the role who undoubtably would have been worse.

So Speed Racer is bad. Really bad. But I did enjoy watching it, even if it was just so I could laugh at it. So it's not completly without merit. But to actually enjoy it as a legitamate film is impossible for me, and I cannot fathom how someone else could. I'll leave you with a clip from the movie that sums up almost all my problems.