Go Speed Racer, Go!

-Speed Racer (2008)-

Speed Racer is seriously visual crack. It is one of the tightest movies I've seen in a while, despite all this nonsense about the movie being a dud. This movie is for fans of Speed Racer, people who love F-Zero, and kids. John Goodman is awesome as Pops Racer and Emile Hirsch is perfect as speed. It makes me want to go rent Alpha Dogs. I could do without Christina Ricci in the movie, she's just kind of there, although there's a scene where Speed and Trixie (Ricci) are talking all romantic like. The snappiness of the dialogue is awesome. It's like a clean Kevin Smith movie. The kid who plays Squirtle is perfect, and his interaction with Chim-Chim the monkey rocks. I sound like I'm rambling, but only because I saw this movie and was taken back to my childhood, although I only remember fragments of episodes. Speed Racer aired early weekday mornings as I was getting up to go to school, and I would just catch like maybe 15 minutes of it before I left.

And that's the problem with Speed Racer. Although the cartoon is amazing, nobody remembers it. Too much time has passed. And although the movie has been updated to introduce the series to a whole new set of viewers, the movie almost isn't gritty enough to make an impact. More little kids and comic/cartoon fans, have probably seen Iron Man already, and maybe made a return visit to the theaters. If Iron Man wasn't as good as people say it was, people would pack the theaters for this movie.

Marketing for this movie kind of fell flat too. The promos that I saw weren't nearly as badass as this film was. The art direction was amazing ... it was seriously like taking a hallucinogenic drug (assumption). I'm trying to be vague in this review, because I don't want to give anything away. Here's the quick summary.

Speed Racer is trying to win a race that killed his brother Rex in order to take down corporate powers that are corrupting the sport. He has a fancy car (the Mach 6) built by his family and equipped with special defensive tools to help protect him against the dirty and corrupt drivers that will stop at nothing to win.

On a scale from 1 - 5 I give this PG rated Family movie a ... 4