Speed Racer
a fantasy-action movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +1/-1
Apparent Rating: 6/10
Overall, this movie was good. Considering the dearth of non-fluffy source material and the quality of the underpinnings, the movie was excellent.
There are a lot of things in this movie that were impressive and very few failures if you have accepted the general premise. The general premise is ludicrous, of course, and the beginning of the movie does nothing to submerge a skeptical adult’s psyche in the fantasy world.
That lack of solid beginning would be my main complaint. It took me probably 25-30 minutes to overcome the first scene. The movie is about fanasty car racing, the kind of racing where cars can jump into the air and do loop-the-loops and jumps and dives on tracks that rival modern-day roller coasters. So why did they start with a lumpy looking kid filling out a multiple choice test form? It did nothing for setting the stage and convinced me that the kid was some sort of defective jerk whose sole purpose on the Earth is to keep other children from learning and succeeding in life. I was shocked that was the same character from the cartoon, where Speed is presented as some sort of brilliant prodigy and an upstanding man.
This school stuff continued a lot longer than it should have too, because we had to know that Trixie (who flew a helicopter in the cartoons and acted as Speed’s spotter for rally races) had been with Speed from almost the beginning. Mostly it seemed like an egregious pandering, “If there are kids in the movie, kids will love it!”
Then the movie starts and the whole thing is a ride as wild as the track.
The main actor, Emile Hirsch also starred in Into the Wild and he definitely has a real career ahead of him. I’m not sure I would have noticed his performance as a performance if I hadn’t seen Into the Wild before Speed Racer, but he brought real acting chops to the part. A lot of the movie was CGI, so they must have shot it in a soundstage against a green-screen, but even knowing that intellectually, I thought it looked as real as it could have. Speed really looks like he’s driving and Hirsch brings it home.
John Goodman does an excellent job as Pops Racer, though too many points he went over-the-top to the cartoony style of the original. In a very strange way, Pops Racer looked like Fred Flintstone, with that sense of “I’m an actor playing a ridiculous role and you shouldn’t take me seriously.” If it had been played straight, there should have been more focus on Pops, with the constant tongue-in-cheek attitude, I’m glad they minimized it. Spritle and Chim Chim were ridiculous sops to the original cartoon and really could have been omitted in my opinion. The girl playing adult-Trixie was not good (her counterpart during the childhood/schoolyard scenes was better.) Whoever she is, she’s a lousy actress. Her part had real solid meat in it and she couldn’t sell it. It’s the inverse of Natalie Portman in Star Wars where Portman was a decent actress and had nothing to demonstrate that with. Trixie was a real role played by someone who is good at standing around looking pretty but nothing more. Susan Sarandon was good at the acting but she didn’t jive with the rest of the look— she looked ancient. The main villain, Royston was good but way too obvious. It looked like he’d been told to camp it up.
The other racers managed to make themselves caricatures. Rex and Racer X did not get much screen time and were played by different actors. No opinion. Taejo was not as bad, there was a lot more to his part and he managed it, but he was still a cartoon.
The car modellers and costumers and CGI people were brilliant in this. I wish the movie had been edited so there were whole scenes of racing without flashbacks or cutaways and I’m not one for watching competitions.
Someone saved this movie from being campy, someone said, “Let’s play this straight and let the audience find the humor themselves.” And that made it a really fine piece of entertainment whenever that shone through. I wish it had been done that way throughout with intent. Whenever there was campy humor and “We know you’re not taking us seriously!” it was disasterous.
It could have been better if they’d been making the movie for real throughout. They had the actors and the script and the CGI and the models and the special effects. But a lot of people brought that “This is humor, I don’t have to be professional.” attitude to the movie. It is, at its heart, a fantasy. For all the action, for all the mechanics, the story is one about a magician who goes on an epic quest to save his family. And you cannot have a successful fantasy without convincing the audience to suspend disbelief. But humor requires bringing external knowledge to the experience and is contrary to suspending disbelief. Humor pulls people out of the immersive experience. And Speed Racer, despite succeeding on many levels, failed at providing an immersion for me.
It could have been an 8 or even 9 out of 10 for me, with the story they had and the material/resources. I liked it, 6/10 or so, but I resent that quarter/third of a movie experience I didn’t get. Obviously most people don’t see turning in merely good work as a failure. I see this movie as taking a great idea and wasting half of it on this product. If they had taken the great idea and really rolled with it, this could have been a phenomenal experience. +1 for some great acting, -1 for wasting an idea.
