mentos and manatees

About halfway through Speed Racer, Emile Hirsch’s title character sits in a parked car with Christina Ricci. Even before the tone of the scene turns amorous, a five year old a few rows in front of me shouts out the word “sex.” This is the highlight of my moviegoing experience.

The film itself is an unholy masala of Japanese anime, the pod racing scene from The Phantom Menace, and The Donna Reed Show. Also there’s a chimpanzee in it. Truly something for everyone.

In their first effort since ruining their own Matrix franchise, the Wachowski brothers have placed themselves squarely in the camp of “maybe they weren’t so good in the first place.” In the sense that Speed Racer bears an authorial signature, it’s muddled, like so many action films of its ilk, by elements that are too bright, too loud, and too much. And in this case, it’s just plain corny.

Not that the source material for Speed Racer is terribly cool to begin with. It is, after all, based on a cult 1960s anime series, enjoyed mostly ironically due to its legendarily poor animation and bad English language dubbing. The film borrows some from the visual style of the original, occasionally washing out of the action into static artificial backgrounds. The homage would be nice, if its use was not the centerpiece of the cinematography. Even at a bloated length of 2 hours, 15 minutes, the film is awash with paint by numbers exposition, accomplished by talking heads recounting events while floating about the frame against the cartoon background. It lends a feeling of montage to the whole picture. And the montage only ever ends when the film does.

The film is unabashedly artificial, which the filmmakers seem to wear as a badge of honor. The problem is that it removes any emotional weight from the proceedings. The impetus for the plot is the death of Speed Racer’s older brother, Rex Racer (also a race car driver, if you’ll believe it) in a fiery crash. But the death scene itself is the most unintentionally comic moment in the film. The whole racing world that has been created is brutal and dangerous, to the point that one could question how its participants could have anything less than a 100% fatality rate. Yet the racing scenes are so over the top that the viewer never worries that anything bad will actually happen.

So I didn’t much care for Speed Racer. It’s an idea that couldn’t have sounded much better on paper than it looked on the big screen. Yet it could have been a decent popcorn movie, even in the absence of a worthwhile plot, if the Wachowskis could have just resisted the urge to throw in so many elements. Surely it’s possible to evoke the spirit of anime without appealing directly, and out of context, to its conventions. Just tell a story, even one as simple and convoluted as this, without giving the audience the kitchen sink.

Film: Speed Racer
Director: Larry and David Wachowski
Stars: Emile Hirsch, Susan Sarandon, Christina Ricci, John Goodman

Viewing Situation: Weekend matinee, mostly empty; digital projection
Rotten Tomatoes Average: 35%
My Grade (Out of 10): 3