Speed Racer: Race without speed
The world of cartoons please all of us, no matter young or old, the colors, the images and the innocent appeal is just so likeable, the feeling of nostalgia and a break from the real world is just more than welcome. However, when you put humans inside the artificial yet pleasing world of cartoons, it would definitely spoil the broth. Warner Bro’s Speed racer comes as a total surprise this summer. When Wachowski brothers The Matrix was released, it gave us so much to cud on, the extreme action sequences, the incoherent dialogues, the binary-equated plot pleased us all. It was extremely refreshing and full of brilliant futuristic ideas, though the subsequent releases in The Matirx didn’t capture the fancy to that level but still they built a lot of expectations from the director duo.
The expectations were not false, the pair has a lot of fresh ideas that give us new frontiers in film making, so when you watch Speed Racer, you see these ideas flying around but when you put them into a sequence and watch them as a whole they do not impress you. Simply because, each idea put in here is a separate entity with an individualistic character of its own that fails to gel well with the rests. The only pat on the shoulder of the animation with the Wachowski brothers breathe life and heart into an animated superficial atmosphere. The film does have a story to tell and has its own human charm with certain emotional moments that put you in a spell, but that soon dispels and you wake up soon bewildered at yourself.
Rating: 2.5/5
Your journey inside out a computer generated world is more than you can afford. The bright colors presented in a bacchanalian feast to stupefy your senses, start hurting your eyes. The experimentation with the animation, the effort to create a visual eye candy, the modernistic ideas are so much that you are left paralyzed with the effect rather than feeling refreshed.
Check out the stills of Speed Racer
Every thing looks beautiful in the movie, not only Christina Ricci but even a jar of peanut butter looks astoundingly eye-catching. Now, we are not used to having everything look so beautiful and when a big tragedy keeps peeking in and out of the marvelously closed knotted Turkish carpet, you are not sure how to react. There are extreme racing scenes, with a cartoonish background and cars with the wheels are armed with shields and swords are flying and zipping past while drivers are busy chatting do give ideas to new age drivers and automobile manufacturers.
The writer-director duo Larry and Andy Wachowski create Speed Racer based on the 1960s famous Japanese animation series. Thought they try to create a movie aimed at a broader audience with a G-rating, PG-13 only makes sense as these days, even kids can make out which are special effects and which are real.
Coming to the story part, Speed (Emille Hirsch) has special abilities from early childhood and he hangs around big brother Rex (Scott Porter) more than spending his time in school. His auto inventor father Pops Racer (John Goodman), a true strong patriarch and Mom (Susan Sarandon), a great support and younger brother Spritle(Paulie Litt, a true Goodman look alike) and his prankie monkey ChimChim are all happy in a family. Speed completely idolizes Rex and when Rex dies in a racing pile, he leaves behind a crack that is hard to fill. Speed takes up racing and turns out to be extremely good at it.
A racing business tycoon Royalton (Roger Allam) wants him to join his team of best drivers, for whome every race is just a money making machine. This offer is turned down by Speed creating a rift between him and Royalto, who swears to blacken Speed’s racing future. The mystery behind the death of Speed’s racer brother Rex needs to be investigated and when Royalton turns nasty, Speed’s beautiful leggy girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci) gives a green signal to Speed to go and get them.
The racer family gets into lot of hitches of match fixers and cons and there comes a mystifying masked man Racer X (Matthew Fox) to counsel and a precautious Inspector detector (Benno Furmann) to investigate. Pop racer and his engineer help Sparky (Kick Gurry) build a March 5 Grand Prix car for him to race with Japanese rival driver Taejo (Korean pop singer Rain), his girl Horuko (Yu Nan) and in a way take on Royalton.
This racing scenes take most of the footage from the screen time from this relatively longer film that goes on for about 129. The film’s good points include the orchestral score given by Michael Giacchino. The animation is top of the line and kids will enjoy it. So, let the kids have a all racey summer with Speed Racer.
Rating: 2.5/5
