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Title: Speed Racer
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| CONSUMER ADVICE |
Parents, there are a couple strong curse words, but no sexual content and the violence is very stylised and cartoonish. Recommended for ages 9 and up. |
Okay folks, this one’s going to be a dozy; let’s talk about “Speed Racer,” the new film based off the 60's anime which is being directed by the Wachowski brothers (of “The Matrix” fame). This is going to be a tough one because this movie walks a very fine line between “high octane fun” and “pretty crap.” I mean that in a good way. If you’ve ever seen the Speed Racer cartoon you may have an image of poorly animated races with poorly dubbed dialog in your mind. You may also have in mind that the cartoon was about a kid who was a race car driver, his family who were mechanics, and their pet monkey Chim-Chim. Well take that image and imagine it as a live action movie, and the movie would pretty much look as you imagined it would.
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Well, except for the fact that the movie is animated better. The story...well, the story doesn’t matter really. It’s about how Speed (Emile Hirsch), distraught over how his brother, Rex (Scott Porter), died in a race several years earlier, has now become a top notch racer in his own right and now faces having to deal with sponsors. A sponsor makes a deal with Speed, but feeling that having a sponsor sponsoring him would betray how he feels about the sport, turns it down. The sponsor warns Speed that every race, including the Grand Prix races, have all been fixed because the point of racing is to make stock prices go up. Or, you know, something like that. Anyway, like I said, all this is pretty much no big deal.
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The only time the story itself takes off is during scenes where the story ever emotionally involves the viewer is during the scenes where the family discusses the impact Rex’s death had on the whole family. Most particularly this is where Pops (played excellently by John Goodman) provides the movie with it’s most emotional scene. Eh, but what am I talking about. Kids won’t care about Rex’s death. They won’t care about Speed’s issues with sponsorship, they won’t care about his relationship with girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci making her first family film in years), or the fact that Susan Sarandon is getting so few roles that she has to settle for making “Speed Racer.” Nah, I’m sure the kids will care most about the car races. Where Speed races in ice caverns, over volcanos, and these race track loops that look like they were built to KILL people with!
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The movie is all at once colorful, loud, and frenetic. Many swirling colors shaded my view after this film was over. It’s pure cotton candy, and the Wachowski brothers prove that they are visual masters regardless of what color pallette they decide to use. Yet the film also tends to provide a bit too much sugar at times, as the movie is almost non-stop insanity that goes on for more then two hours. It’s enough to make you wish it would slow down, and when it does slow down you wish it would start back up again. Those who see this film in IMAX would do wise to bring a barf bag. Visual and story aside though, I’m going to go on a limb and say the movies greatest strength is that the movie takes itself seriously and doesn’t go for any inside jokes.
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Once you start making inside jokes the movie starts to steer towards being camp, but “Speed Racer” takes it’s material seriously enough so that you never get this feeling that the actors are winking at the camera. It feels really odd knowing how (at least fundamentally) stupid this film really is. Still though, the directors are clearly fans of the work, the actors seemed to have fun with their roles, and therefor I had fun at this movie. And I know I’m going to regret saying this in the morning, but I really do love that monkey.
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