Eye Candy #154 - "Speed Racer"

Speed Racer: I know the basic premise of the source material, and like many Japanese cartoons of that era, it never seemed strong enough to support a feature length film. And I was right. And when plot fails, what do you do in Hollywood? You get as loud and obnoxious as possible and dazzle them with the pretty pictures so they won’t notice the plot is wafer thin. The violence is all bright colors and ridiculousness, absurd villains with equally absurd villainy. Helmed by the Victor/Victoria combo of the Wachowski Bros., coherence and intelligence take a backseat to artifice here. The first half of this movie is some of the worst film ever committed to digital. The second half is marginally better, but only because the characters STOP TALKING all the time. But for a movie that’s selling itself on spectacle and frenetic energy, it shouldn’t be anywhere near 2 hours long. Speed Racer is the young hotshot racer on the WRL circuit. Team Racer is Speed, his father Pops, his mother Mom, his little brother Spritle, the family chimp Chim-Chim, Sparky the mechanic, and his girlfriend Trixie. He is asked by Inspector Detector to take on businessman E.P. Royalton. Enter a whole assortment of colorful adversaries, as well as Racer X, the masked racer who may or may not be Speed’s deceased older brother Rex. The cast is game and Christina Ricci has never been cuter, and thank goodness we have Roger Allam here to chew scenery with his very British teeth. But sadly it’s all for naught. Woodchuck sez, “Too much for too little.”