Speed Racer (2008) ***

"It doesn't matter if racing never changes. What matters is if we let racing change us."

- Racer X

It's hard to give Speed Racer a fair review. Part of me wants to condemn its choppy manner and frequent inexplicable weirdness. But part of me wants to embrace the bright colors, exciting race scenes, and yes, its strong messages about competition, family, and evil big corporations.

Having seen and enjoyed a few original Speed Racer cartoons, I feel that I am a bit more qualified to review this film than your average critic. As a fan, the first half hour, especially the first race scene was incredibly thrilling. But then the family sat down to have a pancake breakfast. And we watch them eat for a while. And then the evil big corporation president comes over. And we watch him eat. Don't get me wrong, the Wachowski brothers can shoot an awesome car race sequence, and they can turn out a watchable breakfast scene, and they can inject their unique imagination into both, but they cannot make them flow together well in the same movie. The action scenes and the family scenes seem to be two separate movies that take place in the same world and have the same actors, but have entirely different paces. It seems that the movie can go from its most frenetic to its most placid in a matter of minutes, throwing it into park rather than coming to a smooth stop.

The movie is well casted with a few standouts. John Goodman (Sully in Monster's Inc.) plays an excellent Pops, who is the focal point of racing as well as family for Speed. Matthew Fox (Jack Shepard from Lost) was the best casting decsion in the movie. His note-perfect and ruthless character is also the most complex in the Speed Racer universe, as he is deeply tormented by...oh, wait, i'm not going to spoil that for you.

Speed Racer is an effective tribute to the cartoon. The campy names, cool car designs, and family values are lifted directly from the show. The animation techniques in the original show were revolutionary (in the T.V. world), so it is just as well that this movie should use cutting edge effects as well. I wish, however, that the dialogue, as rediculous as much of it was, could have been more inspired by the cartoon (and perhaps they could have shortened the talking scenes by talking faster). Another thing conspicously absent: Speed's trademark exclamation, "OHHHHHHHHHHH!"The look of this movie could only have been created by a cartoon and caffeine fueled imagination. Everything is swathed in bright colors. Very bright colors. Surely the inventors of color film never imagined that their invention would be (ab)used this much. Even painted in normal colors, the outlandish universe of Speed Racer would seem utterly strange (note the above comment about imagination). It is a world that could only come into being through the magic of CGI (and some will think that CGI never should have stooped that low).

My take? I love it. Fewer movies have been made that show this much imagination. For many of us, it is a trip back to our childhood of making hotwheels cars do outrageous stunts and building fantastical worlds from Legos. The Wachowskis have let their imagination loose and have made CGI do their Hotwheels stunts and Lego castles in photorealistic technicolor. Some of our retinas just wish that their imagination could have kept the color palette a bit more limited.