Flashy race that wipes out quickly
Amid the push by filmmakers to deny photo reality in favour of animated impressionism comes the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer, a movie that gives the sensation of being trapped inside a 3-D video game.
In this aggressively rudimentary emotional drama built around impossible racing car action, actors are painted into a cartoon world through computer-generated imagery as images move across the screen like shifting panels in a comic strip. The basic laws of gravity and aerodynamics aren't just denied, they're totally repealed.
Multitudes of young people worldwide will undoubtedly make a dash for this new movie experience from the creators of the Matrix series, being released in the UAE before its US outing. Unlike a Pixar cartoon that embraces the widest audience possible, Speed Racer only lets gamers, fanboys and anime enthusiasts into its ultra-bright world. Story and character are tossed aside to focus obsessively on PG-rated action and milk-guzzling heroes.
The film, derived from a 60's Japanese cartoon series itself inspired by a Japanese manga, pits the Racer family of car nuts – Rex, long dead thanks to race track malevolence; younger brothers Speed (Emile Hirsch) and Spritle (Paulie Litt); their parents (John Goodman and Susan Sarandon); and a chimp named Chim Chim – against an evil auto magnate (Roger Allam). He fixes races, probably killed Rex, and aims to destroy the Racers.
Speed and his family-designed car, the Mach 5 – which looks like a souped-up Corvette by ways of Q's gadget factory in the James Bond series – take on this Evil Empire in race after race, with help from the mysterious Racer X (Matthew Fox), Speed's girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci in her least interesting role ever) and a ambiguous Japanese racer (Korean pop singer Rain).
Like any good video game, each race happens in a different environment from tropical island loop-the-loops to a race that starts in a North African desert. The miscalculation here are the wearying number of races that all look alike no matter what backgrounds. Two climatic races might be one more than any film can successfully sustain.
There is a certain desperation at work here where the filmmakers seek to offset story lags – ie, everything between the races – with chimpanzee tricks, kid-brother hijinks, Ninja martial arts by the family and a raft of vicious yet harmless villains.
The whole thing, curiously enough, reminds you of Disney's 1982 Tron, the very first attempt to make a live-action movie look like something spit out by a computer.
The numbers
$100m: The production budget for Speed Racer, as estimated by the-numbers.com
$25m: Opening weekend grosses required to generate a profit for this movie, according to The Hollywood Reporter trade paper
3,600: Theatres the film is being released across the US this weekend
Speed Racer. Stars Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, Susan Sarandon, Matthew Fox. Rated G.