Speed Racer Reviews
Top CriticAmid the overly earnest tone, (almost) squeaky-clean humor and familiar messages about teamwork and integrity is the rare film family that's as strong at the start as they are by the end.
Twelve-year-old boys should be wowed, but for the rest of us, it will depend on your appetite for eye candy.
Even the target audience of 10-year-olds might get jimmy legs sitting for a punishing 135 minutes as the Wachowski brothers projectile-vomit their cotton-candy dreams all over the big screen.
| Original Score: 2/4
I love the look and the style and the spirit of this film.
Speed Racer creates a timeless, visually seductive world suspended somewhere between the pop '60s and the sci-fi future. Its biggest disappointment, strangely enough, is its raison d'être -- the races themselves.
Speed Racer intends to convey a sense of heedless momentum, but it drags painfully.
This toxic admixture of computer-generated frenzy and live-action torpor succeeds in being, almost simultaneously, genuinely painful -- the esthetic equivalent of needles in eyeballs -- and weirdly benumbing, like eye candy laced with lidocaine.
More than the story of the Racer family, Speed Racer is the visual autobiography of the Wachowskis and their pit crew of computer-nerd Einsteins, using the tools of their trade to transform the movie medium.
For a movie about velocity, the excitement factor is low and the races feel like a drag.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
The movie, unfortunately, doesn't make that leap from sensation to art, but it suggests fascinating possibilities for moviemakers interested in using the latest techniques seriously to explore the world -- the fairyland we have made with our technology.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Shapes hurtle toward you, then recede abruptly, each bearing some fragment of narrative information that has now passed you by forever. Nausea and anxiety begin to wash over you in overlapping waves.
The actors seem lost in a gumball dispenser; the audience, for the most part, might well feel the same way.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Someday, real artists may come along to use some of the techniques that the Wachowskis are developing. Then things will get interesting.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Any film fan will appreciate the Wachowskis' vision of this alternate universe that's every bit as densely textured and as pan-Asian/pan-planetary in its casting as The Matrix.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Speed Racer is brilliantly photographed and edited. It's told in a literally visionary style, full of innovation and breathtaking risk. But when it comes to the story, it's running on empty.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The movie makes you crave a streamlined story, interesting characters and a joystick.
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| Original Score: 0.5/4
Writer-directors Larry and Andy Wachowski, the creators of the Matrix films, once again invent stunning visual tricks in this adaptation of the late-'60s Japanese anime.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Were Larry and Andy Wachowski just really, really lucky when they made The Matrix?
| Original Score: 1/4
The fakeness of it all overwhelms, dampening any real excitement. It's hard to care about characters so stiff and one-dimensional they out-cartoon the cartoon originals.
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| Original Score: 2/5
It gave me a headache, a stomach ache and the less-defined unease that comes from witnessing a major change in the zeitgeist. Because the zeitgeist, judging from this movie, now embraces rattle-headed visual delirium at all costs.
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| Original Score: 2/4
An eye-popping, day-glo videogame that's as emotionally empty as it is visually exhilarating, Speed Racer is style, style, style without substance, but then it moves so fast that many may not care.
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| Original Score: B-
Sugar, not petrol, is the fuel that comes to mind watching candy-hued, visually hyperactive, narratively sputtering Speed Racer.
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| Original Score: 2/4
This is a movie that is giddily, gorgeously overwhelming, from the cool slow-motion to the Kubrick cartoons to the wormhole pyrotechnics to the kaleidoscopic bliss.
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| Original Score: A
Speed Racer is so hyperfrenetic that, in the end, you wonder if the Wachowskis aren't trying to pull off an elaborate hoax -- a deranged techno fantasia posing as retro-ish family fare.
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| Original Score: C-
So bereft of intelligence, style and excitement that I can't figure out who in the world it's supposed to appeal to.
The Matrix creators Andy and Larry Wachowski barrel through this adaptation of the 60s animated series, hoping perhaps that no one will notice the story is as flat as roadkill.
The movie demands you be a glutton for sensation and then has the nerve to ask why you're not hungrier.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Speed Racer is a manufactured widget, a packaged commodity that capitalizes on an anthropomorphized cartoon of Capitalist Evil in order to sell itself and its ancillary products.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Yes, from adults through teens to tykes, there's something here for everyone to dislike -- the whole clan can have fun making fun of this thing.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Speed Racer offers a crazy, turbo-charged mix of cartoon kitsch, gamer action, and a wild new way to think of -- and look at -- movies.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A frenetic, densely layered, narratively scrambled blob of moviemaking that will leave viewers alternately baffled and sensorially stunned.
Speed Racer sets out to honor and refresh a youthful enthusiasm from the past and winds up smothering the fun in self-conscious grandiosity.
| Original Score: 2/5
At its best, it's buoyant pop entertainment focused on three things: speed, racing and retina-splitting oceans of digitally captured color.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Against all odds it succeeds, making for a spectacular -- and spectacularly strange -- viewing experience.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Ultimately, Speed Racer comes down to the lesson your parents taught you: Despite the flash, looks aren't everything.
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| Original Score: 3/5
It's frankly exhausting, and like that bag of Skittles, it won't really satisfy your hunger. But look at all those bright, shiny colors.
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| Original Score: 3/6
At an exceedingly long 135 minutes, the film needs more than what might result from the explosion of a Crayola factory, and Speed Racer has nothing extra to offer -- no heart, no excitement, no moments to cherish.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Young boys are the only suitable audience for Speed Racer, and even they might feel an urge to squirm between the videogame-style, whizbang, jellybean-colored, CG-jiggered car races that are the adrenalized heart of this entertainment with no soul.
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| Original Score: C
The Wachowski brothers have tumbled into a matrix of their own with Speed Racer, one which has rendered them completely out of touch with the outside world.
I can sit through just about anything, but I draw the line at two hours and 15 minutes of fuchsia vomit. To suffer through this kind of hell, movie critics deserve combat pay.
Ideologically anti-corporate, previous Wachowski productions aspired to be something more than mind-less sensation; Speed Racer is thrilled to be less. It's the delusions minus the grandeur.
I reckon the M.P.A.A. should use the advent of Speed Racer to revive an old ratings symbol: a big Roman X, meaning 'of no conceivable interest to anyone over the age of ten.'
It's an eyesore, a shambles, with incoherent action and ear-buckling dialogue.
Unlike a Pixar cartoon that embraces as wide an audience as possible, Speed Racer proudly denies entry into its ultra-bright world to all but gamers, fanboys and anime enthusiasts.
Pure cotton candy -- entirely non-nutritious but too sweet and pretty for young people to resist.
