Movie Review: Speed Racer

First of all, we saw Iron Man, and nothing can be said about it. It is perfect.

After that, we saw Speed Racer.

Imagine your favorite low-budget Saturday morning cartoon from the 1980's. Now give it a million dollars and a generous hit of acid. Instead of watching it on your parents' nappy rug in your pajamas, imagine watching it trapped inside a kaleidoscope made out of the stained glass from Chartres cathedral. Also, you're wearing a slick vinyl jumpsuit fashioned in the most virulent possible shade of your favorite color, and it's lined with baby-soft fleece.
Speed Racer was as bright and shiny as any plastic toy you wanted with the whole of your child's heart and simply BURST with pleasure when you got it. I've never seen such use of color anywhere before and I think we may have raised the bar on cartoon adaptations. The Wachowski Brothers, in their damn-near infinite wisdom, seem to have postulated on the depressing lack of intensity we all suffer when the wants of childhood wane into less than life-or-death humdrum adulthood. They took this fade and turned up the contrast on it until we are reduced to an open-mouthed stare punctuated by involuntary laughs and cheers. Congratulations, boys, you've made us all eight years old again.

Emile Hirsch is a wonderful Speed, elegantly echoing the performance of Scott Porter as the haunted older brother, Rex. Nicholas Elia as young Speed is the portrait of a cheerfully ADD-addled child of the exact type the movie appears to be made for. Christina Ricci is wide-eyed and fetching as the spitfire Trixie, who in this adaptation drives a racecar as well. Female characters here are remarkably well portrayed, Susan Sarandon is lovely and genuine as always in her role as Mom. John Goodman shows us a depth of chracter undreamed of in his other roles and frankly unexpected in such a film. Comic relief comes to us courtesy of the perrenial Fat Kid. Following in the footsteps of the Goonies' Chunk comes Paulie Litt as little brother Spritle, replete with chimp sidekick and a lust for all things candy. All in all, the cast is well-chosen and well-directed, providing a formidable distraction from the almost non-stop action.

The racing sequences are dizzying, pulse-pounding and wonderful. John remarked as we watched that the racers seemed to be practicing the long lost martial art of Car-Fu. The drivers are wildly out of control and daring, the terrain nightmarish and swooping through the Technicolor skies. The gadgetry is the of the gleefully impossible type only known to the world of animation, and we do not disbelieve it for a second. We are drawn in past the point of grown-up skepticism.

I highly reccomend you take your kids to see this. On the other hand, if you don't have kids yet, or if you sometimes think wistfully that the sky was bluer, the trees were greener, and everything was so much brighter when you were a kid yourself... buy yourself some popcorn, promise to be quiet and sit still, take yourself in hand and go see Speed Racer.