The Wachowski Bros. film, Speed Racer (2008)

If you happen to know any 9 year-old stoners, the Wachowski Bros.' 2008 flick, Speed Racer, is just the thing for them. That’s about the size of it, with this weird, weird film. It’s target audience must have been kids in grades 1 thru 4. I’m tempted to say younger, but this thing is over 2 hours long, and in the beginning, especially, there is some odd, confusing time-shifting in the script.  Speed Racer is based on a late 1960s Japanese television cartoon series, which itself was based on a manga from a decade before that. It wasn’t what we think of when we think of manga today--it looked more like Scooby-doo, for instance.


The Wachowski Bros. (of Matrix fame) came late to the project, although it had floundered so much, they still had a lot to do with it, getting full writing and directing credit. I have to admit, I kind of liked the movie, even though, when it wasn’t dazzling with some virtually unprecedented, colorful CGI, it was following in the cheesy Disney footsteps of flicks like Herbie the Love Bug or any number of other Disney kids flicks that I considered too corny to watch even when I was a kid. More charitably, it also reminded me of Willy Wonka, especially the Johnny Depp remake. (BTW,  Depp was originally cast in the lead here, but happily for all concerned, bowed out, replaced by Emile Hirsch, who did quite a good job with it. And in fact, it was a good cast, including Christina Ricci, Susan Sarandon, John Goodman, Matthew Fox, and Roger Allum (who weirdly kept reminding me, a LOT, of Christopher Hitchins). They did their best with what they had.





The trailer


Many critics were put off by the fact that there were three lengthy car race segments which they considered rather redundant. These were often really quite a lot like watching someone play a Nintendo game, and I’m sure this was quite consciously done. I imagine they had hopes of turning this into a  successful computer game. There have been Speed Racer computer games, but as far as I’ve discovered, they have been based on the original.


This clip shows a little bit of the cartoon, followed by the computer game:





There’s no denying, cinematically, this movie is head and shoulders above the original, which was rather crude in terms of its animation. The racing in the Wachowski version is not simply ordinary Grand Prix, but futuristic, deadly action on an impossible, rollercoaster sort of track. I was once a fan of Indy cars, and I kind of got into the races here. (Come to think of it, I was actually into the Grand Prix cars around the time this was a Japanese television show. I even made a model of the Chapparal. So... )


I see Speed Racer as a knowing homage to several very familiar entertainments for little boys. There are two lengthy and highly stylized fight sequences that are sort of Three Stooges gone ninja. John Goodman, suddenly revealed as a former wrestler, spins a ninja around over his head, and you half-expect to hear him go “Woop woop woop” like Curly, and his son executes the famous two fingers in the eyes attack. The Wachowskis were born in the late ‘60s, and this slapstick stuff was still on tv. So they’re framing the Japanese cartoon in a retro American context. If I were given the task of filming Speed Racer, I’m not sure what I would have done differently.


There is, however, a pretty limited audience for this. Some of it requires an older child’s understanding, but a lot of it is more on the kindergarten level. As far as adults go, it’s clearly not for all tastes. It cost $120 million to make and closed in US theaters with a fraction of that in box office. It’s probably about breaking even at this point.