|
Movie Review: Speed Racer
by Bill Wine
A young man who lives for racing, enters a cross-country race in hopes of saving his family business and the integrity of racing itself.
RATING: PG
GENRE: Adventure fantasy
RELEASE DATE: May 9, 2008
RUNNING TIME: 2 hours and 15 minutes
VIOLENCE FACTOR: Mostly pure racing action, but some implied violence
BAD WORDS: A few; hardly decipherable with all the background sound effects
RACY? Not at all
OTHER THINGS TO KNOW: Also showing in IMAX theaters
GRANDS:
CRITIQUE:
Speed it's got in spades. But that doesn't mean it's fast.
Speed Racer, from the Wachowski Brothers, Andy and Larry, creators of The Matrix trilogy, is a vroom-vroom thriller that seems to last forever as it goes around in circles, the way race-car drivers are wont to do.
As they did in The Matrix, the Wachowskis offer groundbreaking effects. But they're after a different — that is, younger — audience this time. So they've resurrected and updated a property whose first in-car-nation was as a Japanese anime that came to American TV in the sixties.
This unabashed kidflick features oodles of seemingly impossible high-speed racing action yet a simplistic drama about one racer battling corruptive elements in the international racing industry. It's a hyper-stylized live-action anime, shot digitally on a green-screen soundstage, with the cast pretending to be on location in a glossy but interminable comic-book-colored final product.
Emile Hirsch plays the racing-fiend lead, with Christina Ricci as his girlfriend, Susan Sarandon and John Goodman as his parents, and Matthew Fox (of TV's Lost) as a rival racer. Given the material, all are underemployed.
But somebody certainly has confidence that no box-office roadblocks will undercut, the popularity of this franchise: the Mattel company and others are betting on the after-movie sales by releasing 150 action figures, race tracks, and other playthings, to say nothing of the video games, blankets, and underwear. (Yes, this, too, will cost you.) Speed Racer plays directly to the small fry with on-the-nose dialogue and special effects that smack of extravagant video games. It's entirely possible that you'll find Speed Racer to be repetitious and one-dimensional but your grandkids will undoubtedly sit there spellbound.
GP Rating System:
Three Grands = Bravo, don't miss it.
Two Grands = Good enough, don't dismiss it.
One Grand = Okay, even if we dis it.
|
