SPEED RACER

dMYD DVD

Starring Emile Hirsch

Trailer

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  Taking its inspiration equally from the source material, Playstation 2 games and that episode of Pokemon that killed half the children of Japan, Speed Racer is a hyper-jumping mess of half formed ideas and base-level insanity that never actually forms the chassis of anything good, but remains the perennial Hollywood noble failure, though it's still preferable to thirty two copies of the last two Matrix films stacked together under a mountain of cocaine, coincidentally the conditions under which the Wachowskis made the film. Its faults lie in the realism/mentalism divide; cartoon characters never look confused by their surroundings or lost in a sea of green screen, choosing instead to scream their passion at the viewer with wide eyes and spastic limb movements, performing unimaginable feats that animation alone allows. Put real, jerking humans into this vat and you’ve got a god-awful mess of good actors trying to make sense of what’s going on; Emile Hirsch comes out best with a decent stab at the impossible task of making a character named ‘Speed Racer’ likeable, whilst Matthew Fox tries hard to imbue a man called ‘Racer X’ with a nice older-brother-Batman quality and a sensitivity entirely lacking from the other supporting characters. The nadir ironically comes in the racing sections; the limits of the CGI result in endless demo-tracks that never create more excitement than a sub-standard episode of Wacky Races, the weightless, unreal cars bringing the unbearable feeling of watching somebody else play F-Zero X.

  Still, there’s a noble attempt to attack big business (at least from something with this gargantuan a budget) and a nice line in John Goodman throwing people around a room like Uncle Phil from the Fresh Prince. It’s a likeable film, but it’s not very good and the little fat-kid comic relief needs to be gene-spliced with his monkey buddy until they’re both nothing more than a gibbering, ungodly bundle of puke on the CGI floor. See it on mushrooms, hope for the best.