GO!

Speed Racer is a tale of corporate espionage as told by a cartoon parrot on methadone that is also on fire.

Because I’m too tired to write anything coherent, I’m just going to share my thoughts with the internet through the magic of lists:

THINGS THAT WERE GOOD

The Racing. This was an important thing to get right, seeing as it occupies about half of the title. The Wachowskis nailed a diegisis-specific type of racing that accounts for the cars’ vertical mobility while also incorporating a history of real-life racing and the precedent set by the source material. Visually, it’s somewhere between drift, Mario Kart and an acid flashback. Completely thrilling every time.

The Kung Fu. An excerpt:

TRIXIE: Was that a ninja?

POPS: More like a nonja. Amazing what passes for a ninja these days.

Brilliant.

Christina Ricci. As always, totally slammin‘ in a way that makes me kind of uncomfortable.

Colour and motion. The entire film is a celebration of colour and motion in the medium. This is what makes everything else work. There isn’t a single static frame in the entire film. Everything is moving all the time. Even outside the action sequences, most screen transitions are done by having a talking head wipe across, which I think is an incredibly efficient way to handle exposition between scenes (or even beats, in some cases).

WHAT FAILS

The story. Shit. It was doing so well, too. The first ten minutes are handled wonderfully–the aforementioned visual techniques make the exposition agile. Three temporally distinct narratives take place at once, and the presentation makes it easy enough for a child to follow (which is kind of the point, actually). Unfortunately, absolutely every element of the backstory and every subsequent development is re-trod in painful, rote exchanges that are presumably designed to give the action room to “breathe.” In this way, Speed Racer’s weakness is exactly what Iron Man did right: Just because it’s an action/kids movie doesn’t mean that the “low” beats have to be cliche or boring. Put simply, the movie is two and a half hours long, and it should have been one and a half. And all it would have taken is the excise of about half the retarded little brother/retarded fucking monkey scenes.

The Villains. Colour does not make characters colourful.

OVERALL

Worth seeing, even if it only suggests a fresh, new way of telling stories rather than actually showing us how that would look.