STUDIO: Warner Brothers
RELEASE DATE: May 9, 2008
STARRING: Emile Hirsch, Matthew Fox, John Goodman, Susan Sarandon, Scott Porter, Paulie Litt, Roger Allam, and Christina Ricci
WRITTEN BY: The Wachowski Brothers
DIRECTED BY: The Wachowski Brothers
GENRE: Action/Family
RATING: PG

Critics often deride visual candy films by comparing the experience to watching someone else play a video game when all you really want to do is pick up the controller and play it yourself. Sadly, for both movie and game fans, Speed Racer is a video game you won't even want to play, much less watch. If you saw someone playing it, you'd smack them over the head with your copy of Grand Theft Auto IV and introduce them to your library of real games. You know those lame non-Nintendo games that have been released for Wii that don't really make use of their controls and are basically structural messes? That's Speed Racer in a metaphorical nutshell - not merely just a series of pretty pictures, but a game that's annoying to even watch, much less play.

Emile Hirsch was nearly Oscar-worthy in Into the Wild, but he simply blends into the candy-colored scenery in Speed Racer as the title character. Following in the footsteps of his controversial and now-dead (or is he?!?) brother Rex Racer, Speed is taking his futuristic, over-designed, car-racing-obsessed world by storm. In Speed Racer, cars don't just drive in circles, they move up, down, and can even jump the driver next to them. Speed tries to stand by his parents, Mom and Pops Racer (Susan Sarandon and John Goodman) and his gal Trixie (Christina Ricci), as the powers that control racing - corporations and cartels - try and entice him into the dark side. Can Speed stand above the evil powers trying to bring him down AND win the big race? And who is the mysterious Racer X (the movie-stealing Matthew Fox), a good guy, a bad guy, or something in between?

The fatal flaw of Speed Racer isn't so much that it's shallow (it is), but that it doesn't embrace that fact. The ONLY way that a movie based on a cartoon like Speed works is if it's as fast-paced as the Mach 5. Get in, give 'em some thrills, and get out. But Speed Racer feels longer than watching every single lap of a NASCAR race in slow motion. It's shockingly repetitive and, in one of the most stunningly misguided decisions in recent moviemaking, over two hours long. If it was 129 minutes of non-stop action, that might get the Wachowski Brothers to victory lane, but there's really only about 30 minutes of even remotely intriguing action in the entire film. The rest of the running time is stuffed with an overly complex plot, nail-on-the-head dialogue (they talk about every race for at least five to ten minutes before they actually happen), and horrendously-timed kiddie comedy courtesy of Spritle (Paulie Litt) and Chim-Chim.

I know what you're saying, and it's going to be the excuse of everyone who claims to like Speed Racer - it's just based on a cartoon. Trust me, I would have loved a Speed Racer that felt like a live-action cartoon, but The Wachowski Brothers haven't made that film. Do you remember how The Matrix movies got so bloated by the final film that everything was treated with the seriousness of the end of the world? Believe it or not, that self-righteousness has been brought into the world of the Mach 5, as every single scene is preceded by unbelievable amounts of hand-wringing and melodrama. Unless you have an incredibly low threshold for kid/chimp comedy, a sense of fun is what's missing in Speed Racer and that should have been the first ingredient.

To be fair, just like in the later Matrix movies, there are moments of fight choreography and special effects that are worthy of praise in Speed Racer. The heart of the film is a long-distance road-rally called "Casa Christo," and that sequence was the only time where I truly felt the movie pick up steam. As Speed and his team race through CGI-designed hills, literally fighting for their lives, the movie finally springs to life. The true shame is that even a sequence this fun feels like too little, too late after enduring the bloated mess that is the rest of Speed Racer.