Oh dear. Now that Larry Wachowski is Lana Wachowski, you may have been expecting some grand transgendered, transhumanist statement from Hollywood’s most enigmatic, bicephalic entity. They are, after all, the same pair who snuck Baudrillard into the multiplexes.
No such luck we’re afraid. This is a kid’s movie, and by kid’s movie we’re not talking Shrek 3. We’re talking The Little Polar Bear 2.
Diehard fans of the original ‘60s anime may feel a certain fluttering at the sight of the Mach 5 or the red neckerchief. But even these good people will stagger out into daylight needing a cornea transplant and a hefty dose of Dramamine.
We could live with the ludicrous cartoon shorthand. Speed Racer has always been about loud one-dimensional ciphers like Spritle the naughty little brother. The main characters – Speed himself (Hirsch), Trixie the virginal girlfriend (Ricci), Proud Mom (Sarandon) and Worried Pop (Goodman) – have no more depth than Chim-Chim the family chimpanzee. This is as it should be.
The races, all 500,000,000 of them, are eye-popping, like Tron played out on a high-tech Scalectrix set. In theory, they should breathtaking. In practice, only the severely myopic could possibly sit through more than five minutes without needing a nice lie down. The noise! The endless primary colours! The camera that literally imitates a tailspin motion for over two hours!
If that wasn’t enough of an assault on the senses, the purposeful digital artifice leaves you feeling discombobulated and disconnected. It’s hard to care about anything that’s happening on screen when it’s rendered in the same pre-school day-glo as Shark Boy And Lava Girl.
Okay, so the film is aimed at tots. But how many tots do you know can sit through a film of 135 minutes duration? It does not help that nothing actually happens. Allow us to save you the admission price. Speed Racer races. The end.