Speed Racer (2008)

I saw a preview screening of SPEED RACER yesterday and I was uncertain going in. The trailer looked visually stunning but just too bright and just too juvenile for my tastes. I'd been interested to see the movie for a while, but when I told friends about it their immediate questions were: "who's in it?" and then "who are they?" Not everyone knows of the original cult-anime series so really it seemed to me that SPEED RACER was living and breathing (barely) off of the name of the Watchowski Brothers. Then I saw it and it took my breath away! There has not been such a visually overwhelming experience put on the big screen in decades! Not since the likes of the sci-fi masterpieces of the 70's has there been anything this powerful or this mesmerising. The effects are overtly lavish - yes. The humour is juvenile - certainly. The story is peppered with unconvincing characters and events and laced with back-story and yet it still manages to be perfectly understandable and (better yet) quite easy to follow. Basically Emile Hirsch plays Speed Racer, a brilliant race car driver whose family has a long and colouful history in a world obsessed with race car driving - racing like no one has ever imagined and hopefully no one ever will outside of the movies! It's a "little-man-takes-on-the-big-companies-and-triumphs" story and predictable as mud in retrospect. All the same you can't help getting caught up in it's unstoppable momentum - by the end you will be cheering Speed Racer on right alongside the million and one animated extras and loving every minute of it. There is enough eye candy in Hirsch and co-star Christine Ricci for the teens, enough childish slapstick for the kids, and just enough action to keep the parents attention-span going. This is, overall, a family movie, but I cannot imagine anyone with any sense of silliness in them not being able to find this absolutely fantastic to watch. This is not BAMBI, and it's not HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL - it's CARS on Adrenalin!!!! This movie is almost a guaranteed flop, but I have no doubt it will last the distance and become a cult classic.