Blow, Speed Racer, Blow

Ok, how to put this? If Speed Racer is to be believed, and I see no reason why it should not be, then at some point in the future, an organization with the taste and aesthetic sensibilities of Cirque de Soleil will gain massive political power and take over the planet. They will then convert our economy to a system based entirely on auto racing and hire the stupidest and freakiest people on the planet as their enforcers who will then use racing to further their own vague, though definitely nefarious, ends. The only force standing against all this consists of the Criminal Investigation Division of the racing league, on organization that consists of incompetent Eurotrash types and a masked, leather clad man called Racer X. They decide that the only thing capable of standing up to the planet's power structure is some teenage douchebag named Speed Racer, his hot girlfriend, his little brother and a chimp.

Were it possible for a situation like this to come about, the world would be pretty much fucked. Luckily, in the world of Speed Racer, it's possible for all this to end happily because the laws of physics have pretty much been done away with. For instance, it's possible to drive a car off a cliff at speeds exceeding 500 miles per hour and land without a scratch on you or the car. Also, it doesn't really matter which direction your wheels are facing when you are trying to turn. The car will simply go in whatever direction you choose, guided, I suppose, by The Force. Fortunately, gravity can also be ignored at will making it perfectly safe to have huge gaps in the race tracks.

Those of you who actually read this site know that I have not been optimistic about Speed Racer. It turns out that all my preconceived notions were true. I guess it was impossible to predict that trying to take the cheap look of a 40 year old cartoon and recreate it as a live action summer blockbuster would turn out to be such a bad idea. And that's the main problem of Speed Racer. It is an ugly movie. I would say Elephant Man ugly except that the Elephant Man at least had a beautiful soul. This is amazing because it was directed by the Wachowski Brothers, the guys who gave us The Matrix. That was such a visually groundbreaking film that it denied George Lucas a special effects Oscar when it was competing against Phantom Menace. Somehow, we went from one of the most memorable and imitated visual style ever put on film to this, something that looks like a dog swallowed several gallons of multi-colored paint and puked them all up at once onto 7 reels of film. Oddly, only people with the clout of the Wachowski Brothers could have convinced a movie studio to invest in excess of 150 million dollars to make a movie with such hideous, cartoonish and seizure inducing art direction.

The only good thing about awful look of the film is that it actually manages to distract you from the stupid plot I outlined above. It seems like the Wachowskis could have just tried harder to get a better script instead of deciding to cover up a stupid story with even stupider CGI graphics.

To top it all off, kind of like a weed being fertilized by the giant pile of crap that was this movie, we had an annoying kid and his best friend, a monkey. Yeah, I know the original cartoon had an annoying kid and a monkey and that there exists a sad, pathetic class of people who would have cried that their exclusion had caused the Speed Racer-verse to become impure and unclean, but this could have been an exact recreation of Speed Racer's animation and writing and they still would have found something to complain about. ("What, couldn't do something original?") Anyway, the kid (Speed's little brother, Spritle and no, I don't know what the hell that name means) and the monkey seemed to feel that the taste and sensibilities of the audience were not being sufficiently insulted so they did things like break into a secure facility in order to steal giant gobs of candy. Oh, the monkey throws its shit around too. I feel that every second that the kid and the monkey were on screen was one second less that we got to see the movie's only saving graces: Christina Ricci's Trixie character and the wondrous array of tight, low cut mini dresses that the Wachowskis kept pouring her into. I do feel sorry for her because she had the movie's stupidest line when she said to Speed, "When did winning become so important?" Yeah, what's with this sudden obsession with winning a professional auto race? That line makes no sense and thus, is a symbol for the entire movie.