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LARRY and Andy Wachowski lay it on thick in Speed
Racer, a jangled, densely layered, narratively
scrambled blob of moviemaking that will leave viewers
alternately baffled and sensorially stunned. This
frenetic adaptation of the beloved 1960s Japanese
cartoon bears little resemblance to that animé classic
of yore, unless you count
Christina Ricci’s saucer-like brown eyes. Here, the
filmmakers take more of their cues from Googie
architecture, video games and their own hyperstylized
visual grammar, perfected in The Matrix movies.
Things
get off to a discombobulated start, with a blurringly
fast car-race sequence that morphs into a flashback,
then back again, in a whirling vortex of dreary
exposition and incoherent action. We meet the title
character as a young boy, daydreaming about his idolized
older brother Rex, whose decline and death are
telegraphed in shards of barking, ham-fisted narrative.
AMID the ultra-sensory
overload of
Speed Racer, Matthew Fox
gets it fantastically down as Racer X.
As
Speed Racer toggles to the present day—or its
futuristic version—it becomes clear that Speed has grown
into a young adult, and is in the process of winning a
big race in front of his adoring family: Mom and Pops
Racer (Susan
Sarandon and
John Goodman), little brother Spritle (Paulie Litt)
and the family’s pet chimpanzee.
The next
day, Speed (Emile
Hirsch) and his family answer the door to a wealthy
sponsor named Royalton (Roger Allam), who proceeds to
take the Racers on a
Willy Wonka-like tour of his fabulous facilities.
For the rest of the movie, Speed Racer centers on
whether the wholesome, down-to-earth Speed will resist
Royalton’s blandishments and, if he does, whether he can
win the sport of car racing back from the crooks and
corporate types who have taken it over.
That
sounds simple enough, but the Wachowskis manage to take
a straightforward origin narrative and cram every
possible back story, subplot, action beat and non
sequitur into a film whose running time exceeds even an
unforgivable two hours. Why, for example, the protracted
sequence involving Mom Racer’s pancakes in the film’s
initial scene with Royalton? Or the endless tutorial on
“the unassailable might of money” that Royalton delivers
to a disbelieving Speed midway through the movie? Why
the constant flashbacks and montages? And is that
Boy George behind the wheel of Cruncher Block’s
truck?
Those
are probably the wrong questions to ask of a movie that
is meant to explode like a candy-colored bomb on the
screen, whiplashing viewers through an electric
Kool-Aid acid trip of retro-futuristic backdrops,
strobe-lit cityscapes and race sequences that resemble
cars fueled by a cocktail of steroids and
Red Bull. The Wachowski house style has always
pushed the boundaries that separate animation and live
action, often to striking effect.
In
Speed Racer, their insistent visual style is
hit-and-miss, occasionally creating moments of
surprising beauty (like the flowers that come into bloom
during a love scene, or the animated zebras that run
alongside a racetrack), but more often resulting in a
disorienting wash of images that finally collapses into
an indistinguishable blur.
When
Speed and his team do battle with Royalton’s henchmen,
scenes that should burst with slapstick spontaneity
instead possess the crabbed, metronomic quality of
something that’s been rehearsed again and again in front
of a green screen. You can almost see the wax penciled
note: “Insert cool stuff here.” (The cool stuff, by the
way, will be familiar to fans of the original cartoon:
tire shanks, slime throwers, smoke bombs and other
gadgets make cameo appearances by way of Speed’s
nefarious opponents.)
So
devoted are the filmmakers to blowing viewers away with
pure style that such elements as character and
performance seem like quaint artifacts of another age.
Hirsch, fresh from his breakout performance in last
year’s Into the Wild, barely registers as the
title character, who seldom utters a word for the first
half-hour of the movie. But Hirsch’s decision to
underplay is probably a wise one within such a
complicated skein of filial betrayal, corporate
malfeasance, criminal corruption, splinter groups of
criminally corrupt corporate malefactors and races that
play out on an endless strobe-lit loop. Speed’s little
brother and his pet chimp provide nothing by way of
comic relief, and Ricci, as Speed’s spirited girlfriend
Trixie, is woefully underused.
Even
more puzzling is the profanity that suffuses Speed
Racer, which is being billed as the first big family
blockbuster of the summer. As hard as it is to imagine
youngsters sitting through a confusing mishmash of windy
speeches and monotonous car races, it’s even more
difficult to think that parents will find it charming
when Spritle flips someone the bird.
Aside
from the chance for parents to indulge in a nostalgia
trip with their unsuspecting kids, Speed Racer
does feature two genuine performances: Allam, as the
villain Royalton, who looks as if he should be doing Tom
Stoppard plays in the
West End, even as he reiterates the tired meme of
corporate-equals-evil. And Lost’s Matthew Fox
(what a voice!) nails the mysterious character of Racer
X.
But when
Fox stars in yet another of Speed Racer’s montage
flashbacks, even the most jacked-up adrenaline junkies
in the audience will no doubt share the same unspoken
wish: Go, Speed Racer. Go. |
