Movie Review: Speed Racer

The Wachowskis come back with a vengeance after the hideous, moneygrubbing disappointments that are The Matrix 2 and 3. I blame it on Joel Silver, their moneygrubbing producer, who convinced them that artistic bankruptcy was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Anyways, Bound is a great movie, The Matrix is a great movie, and guess what? Speed Racer is a great movie.

Speed Racer is a guy. That's his name. Speed Racer. He lives in a world kind of like ours, but much more colorful, where a popular sport is a type of auto racing wherein the cars are like gymnasts, springing about the track like living things. Somehow the laws of physics are different in this world, so as the 3000 pound cars are flung about, the necks of the drivers do not snap like so many toothpicks. Accept it. The movie is true to its fantasy in that it sets rules and lives by them. The cars are acrobatic, but they have limits, and their moves aren't invented on the fly for the convenience of the script.

You've never seen a movie like this. It is gorgeous. There are clear nods to videogames (e.g. Rex failed to hit the "quicksave") and anime, but the Wachowskis succeed in crafting their own style that's absolutely like nothing you've ever seen before. It's pop art, or I'm Roy Lichtenstein.

I've basically given up on action movies, but I was actually interested in the races in Speed Racer. They're exciting, despite the unreality. Somehow the movie creates a reality that has enough weight to keep you interested while being incredibly fluffy and neon.

Plus, there's fatkid- and chimpanzee-humor, which works, again, better than it should. I was amused by Chim-Chim in a way that I'm not normally by movie monkeys (cf. Cutthroat Island).

And: real actors! Susan Sarandon and Emile Hirsch and Matthew Fox are all fantastic. John Goodman is typical John Goodman, which isn't bad. Chim-chim should get a friggin' Oscar. There are ninjas.

Don't get me wrong. This movie is not for every one. Speed Racer is a strange movie made by strange filmmakers who are real artists taking something idiotic (or so I assume -- I've never seen the cartoon) and making of it something real, something beautiful, something that has a few strong things to say about art and family, and a lot to say about cinema.