While you were at home on the edge of your couch frothing at the mouth to see which David would become our next American Idol (yawn!), me and fellow GEP contributor, Jonathan Cook, headed to our local multiplex to check out the Wachowski Brother's box office failure Speed Racer. With a little tweaking and a major time decrease, this strikingly beautiful-to-look-at picture could've been the film to beat this summer (which Jonathan has dubbed "The Summer of Horrible Comedies"). 
Visually this is the most stunning film I've seen in a long time--it's bright, candy-colored, and popping with energy. The races are thrilling and the various cars are amazing, full of hidden weaponry and such. The problem here is the plot, in the sense that there is waaaaaaaaay too much of it. The PG-rated film is aimed at families with small children and the Wachowski's script shows just how little they know about small children. I might be wrong, but I'm not sure kids are really that interested in shady corporate dealings. There are monologues so lengthy and convoluted that even I had a hard time following the story. There was something about stocks (kids love stocks!), some stuff about the evils of selling out to the Man (kid's especially love parables about selling out!!!), and new, pointless characters introduced every couple of minutes. Thankfully these boring moments are intercut with the antics of Spritle and Chim-Chim, Speed's little brother and Speed's little brother's pet chimp, respectively. Once these antics grow stale (and that does not take long, dear reader), any moments spent away from the track make one more nauseous than the frantic racing scenes themselves. The cast, for the most part, is spot on. Christina Ricci is a delight as Speed's sexy live-in girlfriend, Trixie. In fact, she's a little too sexy. Speed and Trixie's sexually charged Mach 5 chat at Inspiration Point would make me squirm had I been surrounded by small children. Plus, Trixie looks an awful lot like Speed's mom played by Susan Sarandon, which brings a tinge of creepiness to her scenes with Speed. John Goodman is appropriately fat as Pops Racer, Kick Gurry's Sparky the Mechanic is appropriately useless in ninja fights, and Pauli Litt achieves maximum annoying in his portrayal of Spritle Racer, arguably the most irritating cartoon character in the history of animation. Matthew Fox is quite good as the super-cool Racer X, though he does have an odd, clipped way of speaking. Perhaps his mask is on too tight? Emile Hirsch makes an OK Speed Racer, though the child-actor playing Young Speed, an ADD addled scholastic underachiever, is dead-behind-the-eyes terrible. It just wouldn't be a GEP movie review unless we viciously insulted an innocent child.
When the trailer first appeared a couple of months back, Jonathan and I had opposite feelings about Speed Racer--as a fan of the original cartoon, I thought it looked neat; Jonathan thought lame. Somewhere in hour two of the film (oh yeah, Speed Racer, a movie for children, is over two hours long! WTF?), Jonathan admitted that what made him hate the trailer, primarily the seizure-inducing cross-country races, was exactly what he loved about the movie. I couldn't agree more. While in no way perfect, Speed Racer is a must for fans of visual effects and plain old coolness.
GEP's Grade: C+
