Dazzling ‘Speed Racer’ is trippy, candy-colored fun

A Review

Click to Enlarge Browse Aspen Times Photos Emile Hirsch stars in the action adventure “Speed Racer.” (Warner Bros.)

Bob Strauss
Los Angeles Daily News
Aspen, CO Colorado
May 12, 2008

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“Speed Racer” is a fanboy-friendly story about a car crazy family in an automotive­ly obsessed parallel world. But it’s also the trippiest movie since “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

If only it used apes, or anything else for that matter, in as astute a way. Nevertheless, this latest explosion of color and motion from Andy and Larry Wachowski, who made “The Matrix” trilogy, is another visu­al groundbreaker. Multiple levels of com­puter images are layered with previously unseen velocity and graphic ingenuity.

Cars careen, fly and fight each other in endless impossible ways, while intensely detailed backgrounds change constantly and whole different foreground perspec­tives slide smoothly by as if on holiday from another dimension. The innovation becomes gratuitous after awhile, but it nev­er stops short of digital design at its state-­of-the-art best. And that goes double in the ear-splitting soundtrack department.

What’s that you say? You want a story to go with all the kinetic wonderment? There is one here, but if that really matters much to you, you might be better off playing the new edition of “Grand Theft Auto.”

Gifted young driver Speed Racer (“Into the Wild’s” Emile Hirsch) lives in primary­colored suburbia with his car-builder pop Pops (John Goodman), his very momlike Mom (Susan Sarandon), his troublemak­ing little brother Spritle (Paulie Litt) and the family chimp. His girlfriend Trixie (Christi­na Ricci, as perfectly designed as any per­formance car) flies her own helicopter. The family lost its oldest son in a crash some years ago. A mostly benevolent mystery driver, Racer X (“Lost’s” Matthew Fox), hangs around.

A complicated back story outlines corrup­tion in the racing world, much of which is now spearheaded by the gargantuan Royal­ton Industries, whose evil owner (Roger Allam) manipulates from a very elaborate, futuristic headquarters in a post-space-age city that appears inspired by that other ’60s series, “The Jetsons.” Suffice it to say that Speed is pure and won’t let Royalton co-opt him. The corporation hires a wide array of baddies — ninjas, even — to take down the Racers, both on and off the track.

Like everything else about “Speed Racer,” its anti-capitalist theme goes as over-the-top as it possibly can, which is ridiculous but kind of interesting in a movie that’s aimed at children, just as its ’60s TV anime series was. Likewise, conversations about family and ethics and such have a flat but deeply urgent quality to them, and can be inadvertently funny for anybody over the age of 9. Just considering them clunky is all right, too.

This stuff is only there to fill time between the races, though, each of which has a different style.

It’s all pretty dazzling. It can certainly wear you out, but take the kids anyway, they’ll probably dig it.

“Speed Racer” — Classi­fied: PG for violence, language, children in peril. Running time: 129 minutes. Rated: Three stars our of four.

SECOND OPINION
Rafer Guzman
Newsday
Somewhere between a Mario Bros. video game and Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Speed Racer” is one of the most visually audacious films to come along in years. With its supersaturated palette and slick surfaces, “Speed Racer” looks like a video-art installation at the Whitney, but it also wants to be an old-fashioned Hollywood family film. Against all odds it succeeds, making for a spectacular — and spectacularly strange — viewing experience.

Writer-directors Andy and Larry Wachowski didn’t so much “shoot” this film as generate it using green screens, 360-degree QuickTime photos and high-definition video. They’ve replaced the Gothic dystopia of their “Matrix” movies with a bright fun zone mostly free of danger: The drivers bounce to safety encased in giant foam orbs that put today’s airbags to shame.

But it’s all an excuse for the Wachowskis to smash virtual cars together and indulge their wiggy aesthetic whims.

Through it all, the cast radiates real warmth; Goodman and Sarandon in particular may catch your emotions off-guard. For all its glossy modernity and pop-art freakiness, “Speed Racer” still has a human heart.