Speed Racer

May 12, 2008

Rated: PG Runtime: 135 min Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Speed Racer is based upon the animated series of the same name from the late 1960’s. The TV version was the English adaptation of the Japanese anime series Mach GoGoGo, and one of the early successes of anime in the U.S. From the time we hard it was going to be translated to live action on the big screen, we’ve been saying it’ll either be ground breaking or it was going to suck on the level of something like Howard the Duck.

The Mach 5 from Speed Racer The movie version is your typical first film when porting something to the big screen in that it shows us everyone’s origin and introduces the characters. In this regard it is pretty faithful to the toon version. The Racer family is, as you might guess, all about racing. Pops Racer is the dad and he builds the cars. Speed is the young driver with loads of talent, but not a lot of experience. And he’s always chasing the ghost of his brother Rex Racer who died in a race. Unknown to Speed, Rex is not dead and now races as RacerX to right race fixers who were trying to kill him. Trixie is Speed’s hot girlfriend who spots from a helicopter. Sparky is his pal and chief mechanic. And mom, well, mom makes cookies for everyone and little brother Spridle and their pet monkey Chim Chim eat all of them.

Cheesy enough for you? This was good stuff when we were little kids in the 70’s watching the re-runs. Buy why? Well, I forgot to mention one character, the Mach 5. Every child of the 70’s has sketched the Mach 5 in his notebook while bored in class and gone “vroom vroom”. The Mach 5 is Speed’s car, but it’s not just any car. Sure it’s fast, but it also has devices underneath that can spring it into the air for cool jumps and even backflips and sideflips over other cars. It has blades that can come out and cut thru a forest so you can just keep racing if you hit the woods. Ice? No problem, push of button gives the tires spikes. Flats? Another button rolls out a spare on the rim instantly. It’s bulletproof, can drive underwater and much more. But this is also a bit of a challenge for making a live action version.

Enter the Wachowski Brothers. The same guys who brought us The Matrix have attempted to create the anime world of Speed, the Mach 5 and friends in live action. As you’ve no doubt seen in the trailers, this thing is almost pure CGI. The car is running on courses that most wouldn’t attempt even in a video game, and it looks good. The Mach 5 does it’s thing nicely, and for us at least it didn’t take too much to adjust to seeing characters in a 60’s technocolor CGI based world.

Ok, so how did we like it? I dont know if the most people are ready for this mix of live actors and this kind of overload of CGI or animation. Most films that have tried anything similar int he past have failed miserably, The Flintstones come to mind. That’s not the problem for us at least. The problem is the appeal of the show was all about the car. And there were long periods of time where the car wasn’t on screen including one run that had to be 50 minutes plus from end of first race to start of the next while they built the characters. During our screening I heard at least 3 adults doze off, and I very nearly nodded myself. It was dreadfully slow. We’re giving it 2 stars. Load up on coffee and try it on DVD if you dare.

Posted by Billy Bob | Filed Under 2 Stars, Christina Ricci, Emile Hirsch, John Goodman, Matthew Fox, PG, Susan Sarandon, Theatrical