……. Go far, far away and don’t come back, for the movie
gives me an acute headache and makes me colour blind. Yes, Speed Racer is quite
a dud from the Wachowski brothers, and I get the horrible feeling that they are
going down the M. Night Shyamalan path… make a brilliant movie and ruin all the
others that come after it.
Let me clarify, Speed Racer is based on a Japanese carton of
the same name which came out on the 1960’s. Some of use would remember seeing
it on Cartoon Network in the 1990’s… and I for one loved it… for I was a car
nut then and a car nut now, and the star of Speed Racer is undoubtedly the car;
be it Speed’s own Mach 5, the super fast GRX, or even the huge evil truck
(which apparently is a race car forged from stolen gold and painted all over to
smuggle it out of the country). Yes, Speed Racer the cartoon was corny is ways,
and silly. But it was fun, especially for the cross-country races which
happened, which a concept is taken from the kind of ‘Australia
to Africa’ rallies which happened earlier,
where people used to race across whole continents…
But enough of the past, let’s get back to Speed Racer. I was
an unabashed fan of the Wachowski brothers after The Matrix, and I also liked V
for Vendetta. But this time, in their struggle to make the movie look and feel
like the cartoon, I’m afraid that they’ve just gone overboard. For one thing,
the characters are too cartoonish and silly… they haven’t tried to make them
real… it would remind you of the early Batman movies before Batman Beings…
cheesy, I guess. Sptritle, Speed’s younger brother is particularly annoying in
the movie version, unlike the cartoon where he is cute.
The cars and the racing, however, stay true to the Speed
Racer ethos. Liberal use of CGI has been made (like in movies like Sin City),
but it works amazingly well in the race sequences of Speed Racer. You get
jumps, bumps, driving up cliff faces, cutting other cars with your buzz saws
etc… My only gripe is that the middle race (the Casa Cristo Cross Country) is
one that reminds me of the original. The other races, the track events (where
the tracks are giant versions of Hot Wheel gravity defying tracks) are
annoying… and the races there have too much colour, and become an eyesore.
Well, I should not moan about the races, for they are the
things that make the movie watch able. Sadly, there isn’t enough racing in the
movie, with too much family drama and all that stuff. And unlike the Dark
Knight, the emotional level here seems to have been made for the understanding
of a 10-year old… and drags the movie along.
But in the end there is a happy ending, and all seems fine…
apart from the fact that your eyes have probably popped out of your head due to
the riot of colours and special effects used in each and every scene of the
movie.
For Speed Racer fans like me, parts of the movie would seem
very enjoyable… and indeed, I wouldn’t mind watching the race scenes or the
cars again… but for those of us who have never seen the cartoon, and those
above 10 years of age, the movie would prove to be headache-inducing
experience.