Viking Night: Speed Racer
By Bruce Hall
April 1, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com

Does this outfit make me look flamboyant enough?
What’s 40 minutes too long, looks like a bowl of skittles, yet has darkened so very many of my fondest childhood memories? If you answered “Speed Racer” then congratulations, you win the rest of this article. For the rest of you, I’ll elaborate. Speed Racer was a crudely drawn Japanese cartoon from the 1960s that depicted a near futuristic society based entirely on auto racing. Seriously, imagine if the entire world economy depended on NASCAR, and the racers just drove around in their cars all the time dressed in their brightly colored, flame retardant race duds. Also, imagine they spent their off hours plotting against each other and devising new and intricate ways to murder each other during races.

I know, that DOES sound pretty awesome. But the best part was that at the top of this cornball universe was the Racer family - Mom, Pops, and brothers Speed and Spritle. They live in a lovely split level home/auto garage with their mechanic Sparky and, for some reason, a monkey named Chim Chim. Occasional visits are made by Speed’s Platonic Girlfriend Trixie. Together, they’re the most successful racing team in the world - because they always play by the rules, stick by their friends, and honor the sport of racing as a matter of personal faith. With his super awesome car - the Mach 5 - and the occasional help of a mysterious ally named Racer X, Speed Racer wages a never ending battle for truth, justice, and jumping over shit in his car.

At least, he did for 52 glorious episodes. As a boy I discovered the wonder of UHF (Kids: it was the internet of the early 1980s) and a whole new world of really weird television opened up to me. The original Speed Racer lived on in syndication as I was growing up, and is singlehandedly responsible for my unhealthy acceptance of almost all things anime. The world famous(ly weird) Wachowski Brothers clearly shared my enthusiasm. Their re-imagining of Speed Racer captured the very small handful of things that made the original show captivating to prepubescent boys the world over. It also takes place in a near futuristic society based entirely on auto racing. It also spits on the laws of physics and is populated with hyper-stylized characters that all suffer from an unholy blend of ADHD and PTSD.

But now, they hold candy colored CGI races on tracks that look like something out of Tron. Speed Racer is one of those rare films that deserve acclaim just because you’ve never seen anything like it. I’m not even kidding when I say the whole movie looks like the inside of a bag of Super High Definition Skittles. At first, it’ll feel like your eyes are being raped. Then, once you’re used to it, you’ll get lost in it. It’s a visually astounding film that – at times – also captures the colorful, gleeful stupidity of the original show. Unfortunately the Wachowskis are a pair of incurable paranoids, so they felt it appropriate to take what should have been a fun, fast paced kids’ movie and marinate it in The X-Files. And what’s the result?

Speed Racer feels like a remake of Death Race 2000 made by Pixar, and based on an Oliver Stone screenplay re-written by Aaron Sorkin. In the original version there was never any need to explain how an auto racing based society came to exist. There was certainly never any attempt to explain why racers all hang around with each other all the time, driving their race cars around everywhere and dressing like comic book characters. And I don’t remember anyone ever telling me WHY every race devolved into a fiery murder-fest. They just DID. None of it was grounded in any kind of reality. But the Wachowskis want you to believe that Big Business and Greedy Millionaires are secretly controlling everything from the price of stock to how many marshmallows are in your bowl of fruit loops. There’s lots of racing, and lots of crazy-ass racers in Speed Racer - and it’s the same ludicrously hilarious shtick I remember from my youth. But the fun parts are punctuated by LONG stretches of self-consciously gaudy exposition.

One minute it's a live action cartoon, the next moment it's a dreary corporate espionage potboiler. If I’m still not being clear, what I mean to say is that this movie is an infuriating mess that makes me want to swallow my car keys. The plot (such as it is) revolves around Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch, slightly more charismatic than a bowl of cold oatmeal), still grieving over the mysterious death of his older brother Rex (Scott Porter) as he’s courted by corporate sponsors for a contract. Helping him through this struggle are his hard working father Pops (John Goodman), Mom (Susan Sarandon), his mechanic Sparky (Kick Gurry), little brother Spritle (Paulie Litt), and Platonic Girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci).

Also there’s a monkey, and God knows more movies could use monkeys (Spielberg? Are you reading this?)

Speed’s most persistent suitor is powerful CEO Arnold Royalton (Roger Allam), founder of Royalton Industries. His company apparently owns and/or controls everything in whatever hemisphere of whatever planet these people live on, because companies can do that. This also makes him inherently evil because again – corporations. Royalton offers Speed a fat contract but the more aggressive he becomes, the more Speed feels drawn back to his family. Eventually, Speed begins to pay a professional price for his decision, drawing the attention of the mysterious Racer X (Matthew Fox), and the shadowy organization behind him. There’s a cancer in the sport of racing, and it’s up to Speed to stop it before it spreads too far.

Wow, that sounds like a great movie that Ron Howard should make. What it does not sound like is a movie about a guy who’s so wholesome he’s waiting to kiss his girlfriend (but no tongue!) until he Wins the Big Race. Is this a kid's movie about a guy trying to help his family by jumping his car over everything, or is this a morbid generational crime thriller nearly as long and twice as complicated as The Godfather? And is this the kind of movie where people die, or not? Because from scene to scene it's not always clear whether we just saw someone killed, or comically jacked up Wile E. Coyote style. I feel like both happened. This kind of ambiguity is not ideal for a kids' movie.

And don't get me started on the film's anti-capitalist spiel. No, I'm not an Ayn Rand enthusiast. I just find it hilarious that a $120 million movie bankrolled by a massive corporation, rendered on a roomful of supercomputers and marketed on every continent but Antarctica has the stones to lecture ME about avarice. By trying to weave some kind of gritty, proletariat manifesto into a movie where everything is made of candy and some people use bees as weapons, the Wachowskis swing at two pitches and hit neither. They’ve disappointed anyone who wanted to have fun who wanted to have fun AND former Occupy protesters looking for a call to arms. That’s unfortunate, because if you squint you'll see - trapped somewhere inside this twisted wreck is a really fun movie, dying to get out.