I'm going to say this up front. I was never, ever a big fan of Speed Racer. Oh, I watched hours of it when I was a kid, of that there is no doubt. Back before the advent of Fox, WDSI TV 61 was an independent station in Chattanooga. This was the station that broadcast all the big 80's cartoons of the day, from He-Man to Voltron. But in 1982, they had a far less modern selection of cartoons to enjoy. Gatchaman, Speed Racer, Gigantor, just slew of old anime. At the time, I wasn't old enough to understand where these cartoons came from. I just thought the actors talked funny because it was funny. And out of the entire afternoon line up, the show with the worst dubbing by far was Speed Racer. I only watched it because it was the lead-in to Gigantor. I didn't really like it all that much. It was funny in spots, but there was nothing about the story that really intrigued me enough to where I was upset if I missed an episode.
Several years later I caught the show again when MTV started airing it. I had more of an appreciation for it by that time, both for its historical significance and for the whole Racer X subplot that I hadn't really paid much attention to when I was a kid. Still, even as a teenager I preferred ninjas, vampire hunters and robots in my anime to dorky racer drivers who had Fred Jones' fashion sense. It just didn't grab me, what can I say.
So it's 2008, and here come the Wachowski Brothers, fresh off their recent success of the first Matrix film nine years ago, pitching their usual "we love and respect anime and Asian cinema" spin routine. Now we have Speed Racer, a live action movie that no one asked for or was anticipating. I went into this film with no expectations whatsoever, no different than someone who'd never seen a single Speed Racer cartoon. All I wanted was to be entertained. I paid actual money, money I earned working a fair trade, to see this film, based purely on the fact that my wife loved the show when she was a kid, and my son loves the new Hot Wheels brand Speed Racer die-cast cars and overpriced play sets. I went to see it at a Drive-In theater, and paid only eight dollars for the three of us to get in. And I still feel like I was robbed.
Speed loses the Grand Prix, half blinded by a nearly crippling case of Round Eye
First things first, as this is just a personal observation that has little to do with my actual review. I find it rather hilarious that the Wachowskis can talk so much shit about their respect for Asian culture, films, anime, blah blah blah, but when they finally bring their magnum opus, their ultimate tribute to anime to the big screen, they change the hero to a white kid and make the only Asian hero in the entire movie into a back-stabbing rich snot lowlife who was only racing to boost the stock price for his father's company. Respect and admiration my ass. Call me overly critical, especially towards a franchise I wasn't particularly fond of to begin with, but in my mind, making Speed Racer a short, soft spoken white kid is no better than when Warner Brothers were planning to stick Nicholas Cage in a Matrix costume and call him Superman. Perhaps for their next blockbuster smash project, the Wachowskis should film a live action adaptation of Berserk and hire Ed Asner for the lead role.
Having saved Princess Toadstool, Mario returned to the arms of his loving wife and kids
On with the plot. Storywise, this is classic Speed Racer through and through. Admittedly, from a pure storytelling standpoint, the script does a good job of compressing the most important parts of the original show's plot into a two hour film. You have Pops Racer, the eternally angry fat guy. You have Speed and his belief in fair play and sportsmanship in the midst of a sport full of cheaters. There's Trixie, the big eyed, helicopter-flying sweetheart. There's Mom, who doesn't do much more than look worried and make sandwiches. You have Sparky the mechanic, who loves Speed like a little brother. There's Racer X, the mysterious phantom racer who drives just like Speed's dead brother and is always saving Speed's ass. And of course, there's Spritle and Chim Chim, the candy-obsessed comic relief. The story follows Speed in his obsession to live up to his brother's legacy, and to save Racer Motors from being taken over or run into the ground by an evil corporate CEO who has been fixing races for decades to boost his company profits. Let me reiterate that, for the most part, I don't have a problem with the plot, aside from the aforementioned lone Asian hero turning out to be a lowlife turncoat. What I hate about this movie, what really ruined it for me, is the execution.
Fear me, for I am ASIAN, and I have hidden motives!
I'm no fool. I realize what is possible with computer effects in this modern movie age. Nevertheless, I have to ask this question. If you are going to make a movie based on an animated show, but the only aspect of the film that's live action is the actors, why don't you just do the whole film in Pixar style animation that actually LOOKS like the original show, but in a 3D setting? Or maybe even a MoCap movie like last year's Beowulf? Surely that would be less of a distraction for diehard fans and easier to digest than these American actors playing Japanese characters, pretending to drive cartoon cars in a cartoon world that, by the way, looks nothing like the world that the original characters occupied, but still manages to look just as fake. When you have cartoon characters driving cartoon cars, you don't think about whether the cars move realistically, or if the world is believable. But put a live actor behind the wheel of that car, and you know that it's really just a guy in a silly costume sitting on a green box in front of a green screen pretending to hold a steering wheel. This new world that Speed and his family inhabit is a vast change in style from the show, both visually and conceptually. The entire world's economy revolves around racing. Everything that exists is tied in some way or another to racing. It's like Speed and Company live on Planet Race.
Now, I'm not Tim Curry, but I still feel that I must apologize for The Shadow, and every other movie he's been in since Clue. Especially Oscar.
Or you might as well say, The Planet Formerly Known as Coruscant, as that's what it looks like. With the exception of Speed's suburban home, the world around him has this Machiavellian futurescape look to it, with huge, towering skyscrapers surrounding massive race track arenas that resemble a sort of mish mash between the Star Wars prequels, Akira, and a more recent anime (about futuristic race car driving no less) called Neo Tokyo. And let me touch on the races for a brief second here, as I'll be making some bigger points about them later that ties into all of this. With the exception of the cross-country race that spans Indian-inspired palaces, desert sand dunes, and icy mountain caverns, the races have a much different feel from the show, taking place in these aforementioned racing arenas with winding, looping tracks with ramps, traps, and drop offs into the urban abyss that more resemble the video game WipeOut than any race Speed ever ran on the original TV show. These races also instilled in me a severe sense of Deja Vu, like I'd seen them all before, but it took me a while to place it. I'll get to that in a minute.
The Wachowskis love to do a lot of quick snap editing, which worked fine in the Matrix, but here it makes it somewhat difficult to keep track of who is flipping over who, which car just popped out a saw blade, and so on. There's so much over saturation to the color in this film that when the race is in motion, especially the races at night, much of the action is obscured by neon, multi-colored light trails and motion blur. In this regard, it's almost as though the Wachowskis spent more time watching Speed Racer X, that abysmal anime remake from 2002, than the they did the original show. In fact, say what you want about the abundance of color as a tool to emulate a cartoon, but to me it's as glaring and annoying as it was in Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy film. Yes, the Speed Racer TV show had a wide color palette, but the colors weren't nearly this glaring. This movie is a day-glo nightmare when it comes to color.
The cars themselves are highly detailed, but seem to have no real weight to them, whipping about on the track like ride cars on a giant Tilt-A-Whirl. Another thing I noticed about the actual race scenes, and this hearkens back to my Star Wars prequel comment, is that some of the "camera angles," especially in the desert scene, looked like they were ripped off from the pod race in Episode 1. There's a good reason for this, and some of the other Lucasian similarities. The film's director of photography is David Tattersall, the D.O.P. on all three Star Wars prequels. He played a big part in designing Lucas's "digital worlds" concept for the prequels insofar as how to properly frame blue screen shots to implement the effects, maintaining the illusion of depth in such shots, and so on. The thing is, much of this is overshadowed by the film's caffeine overdose production design. The film looks less like a Wachowski Brothers movie than it does a Robert Rodriguez family film. You could watch Speed Racer right behind Spy Kids 3D and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lava Girl and be hard pressed to convince the average movie goer that the films weren't made by the same director and FX house, especially when it comes to Spritle and Chim Chim's invasion of the evil Mr. Royalton's race car factory, with factory workers on Segways whipping past our candy-jonesing heroes at nothing short of warp speed.
Holy shit on a Hershey Bar Pops, your nipple is fucking HUGE!
And about Mr. Royalton. We hear a lot about the innovation of the Wachowski Brothers. Hell, several of the reviews thus far on the web are praising them for this movie, as though it is their masterpiece, a work of art that has elevated popular film to new heights. I must have watched a different Speed Racer movie, as there's nothing here really that they haven't done (or done by others) in their previous outings, from the Matrix to V For Vendetta, although some of it was done somewhat backwards. Mr. Royalton is a good example of their penchant for dumping mass amounts of exposition in one long, exhausting scene so as to leave the action as plot free as possible. Mr. Royalton's speech scene, where he tells Speed how racing really works, comes across as little more than a rehash of the scene in The Matrix Reloaded, where Neo learns the truth from the architect in what feels like a two hour symposium on Star Trek: The Next generation tech babble. The truth itself is different, naturally, but the delivery is the same. The scene goes on forever, and kills the momentum the film had going for it, resulting in it having to rev it back up going into the third act.
In the Matrix films, The Wachowskis helped develop the "Bullet Time" effect, a new camera system that allows 360 degree rotation during live motion shots, and other techniques in an attempt to present anime-style action scenes in a real world setting. Here, they do the reverse by placing real-world actors in straight-forward anime fight scenes. It happens first in our introduction to Spritle and Chim Chim, where the two of them are in the den watching TV. Suddenly they break into a spontaneous Kung Fu battle, complete with anime-inspired motion lines replacing the the actual background. This was done again, though less glaringly, in the fight scene on the mountaintop. And let's not forget the fight scene in the Hotel between The Racer Clan and some evil ninjas (!!!) where we learn that in addition to race car driving, everyone in the Race family short of Mom (but including Spritle and Chim Chim) are Kung Fu masters. Well, Pops was apparently a high school wrestling champion, evidenced by a close up shot of his championship ring so we'll know why he uses an Airplane Spin as opposed to a judo chop.
Welcome, one and all, to Walt Disney World's Inaugural Main Street Pontiac Firebird Parade!
And now a quick word about the costumes. The Wachowskis really went for authenticity here, but it's not consistent. When Speed is racing on the official circuit, he wears a two piece racing jumpsuit. When he takes part in the cross-country rally, he switches to his traditional Blue polo shirt and red ascot. Pops looks just like Pops, Spritle has his striped beanie, Chim Chim is wearing his overalls, Mom has her apron, and so on. The biggest departure here is really Racer X, who looks he stole Ben Affleck's Daredevil outfit and painted it to match Cyclop's uniform from the X-Men series.
I actually prefer a little alteration. I'm not talking about "No Yellow Spandex" or "Nipples On The batsuit" here. But I prefer in these types of films something that pays homage to the original look of the character without being a total facsimile. When the costuming for a film based on a cartoon or comic book is too true to the source material, it just makes the actors look like they're at a huge cosplay party. In other words, they look like complete and total asshats. When Speed first showed up in his Blue shirt and ascot, the first thing to flash into my head was John Goodman walking around in a polyester version of Fred Flintstone's animal skin, which was quickly followed by a flashback to the costumes from Roger Corman's apocryphal Fantastic Four film. When the costumer keeps things too close to home, it just looks exactly like what it is, a costume, rather than what this character would actually wear in their everyday life.
Moving on, let's talk about the score. My God, the score. The music sounds lifted straight out of a cartoon, which of course is precisely what they were going for. This particularly noticeable whenever something humorous or overly silly is going on, usually involving Spritle and Chim Chim. This in itself is not so bad. For a film that is taking up the reins from a 30 year old cartoon, you expect there to be some retro aspects to it. What bothers me is when the music starts splicing in bits and pieces of the original theme song. Every time that took place, it just yanked me right out of the film. It reminded me of the Scooby Doo films, when snibits of the theme music would play every time Scooby did something brave, or Matthew Lillard did something stupid. I appreciate the inclusion of the original Japanese theme song being played over the closing credits, but I would have preferred if the composer on this film, Michael Giacchino, had left it at that. This stands as a good example of why the TransFans should be happy Michael Bay shot down the idea of incorporating the original Transformer theme music into the theatrical score.
And then Racer X ran over Elektra, shortly after blasting her with his heat vision. Ta-Daa!
So now, we come full circle back to that twinge of Deja Vu I experienced while watching the film. I'm going to say this well ahead of time. Several of you are going to read what I am about to say and think that I am a complete fucking moron (I know of one gang in particular that are going to have a field day with this) but I just have to bring it up. So here we go, for better or worse.
This kept nagging at me for hours after we left the Drive-In. I just couldn't place it. It was still in the back of my mind the next day while shopping at Wal-mart, when I happened by the toy department, and saw several of those Hot Wheels brand Speed Racer play sets on display, with their looping tracks and spring-loaded booby traps and what have you. I was looking at the artwork on these sets, and just like that, it hit me.
A couple of years ago, Mattel released a series of Direct-to-DVD films based on their Hot Wheels franchise. I got the first one for my kid, as he's a huge Hot Wheels enthusiast. Despite its barely-above-Reboot-quality CGI, he loved it. he loved it so much that he had me watch it with him every day for about two weeks solid. So for a time, I became intensely familiar with the entire film, from open to close. As with all kids, he eventually got bored with the movie and moved on to another film to watch on infinite loop, and I more or less forgot about it, right up until I was standing there in Walmart's toy department. And then I started to think about that World Race... how the cars drove on elevated tracks that twisted, cork-screwed, and spun in loops, just like the play sets that inspired them.... how the race spanned a Jungle, a Desert, an icy cavern in the mountains, and a futuristic city where the track spun and wove itself around, through, and over the towering buildings... how at one point one of the heroes was thrown off the track and used some built-in gadgetry to scale a vertical wall of rock and ice... how one of the villains is actually the brother of one of the other racer car drivers in disguise who wears a black jumpsuit and face mask to hide his identity (this of course is mostly an original plot point of course, but I'm referring to the visual similarity) and on and on and on. I went on the Internet, and started watching clips of this movie on Youtube, and was rather intrigued by what I saw, in comparison to how much I had remembered. Here, have a look at this:
And this one:
And especially this one:
Check out the locales. Check out the similarities between the track here and the tracks in the stadium races in Speed Racer. Look at the design of the cars, and compare them to the more futuristic cars in the movie as opposed to the designs from the original cartoon. Did you ever see Speed Racer driving the Mach Five through an arena with pre-lit metallic track that spiraled in and around sky scrapers? No. Most of the races in that show were on regular concrete roads winding through narrow mountain passes. In essence, the races looked like cartoon takes on the race scenes from the original love Bug movie with James Bond style gadgets and booby traps.
Now obviously, the creators of this Hot Wheels movie borrowed some things from the original Speed Racer concept, such as gadgets and the like, but the other stylistic similarities to this three year old film to what the Wachowski Brothers just released are fairly significant. Now am I claiming that the Wachowski's design team ripped off a Direct-To-DVD kids movie? No, or maybe, I'm not sure, simply because of how outlandish an idea that really is. But what I am definitely suggesting is that the Wachowski's made a rather inspired marketing decision in regards to the look of the film. Simply put, I believe that, rather than doing normal everyday road races for Speed Racer, they designed the tracks, the tricks, and the cars to resemble Hot Wheels sets, both to sell a shitload of tickets to kids who wouldn't know Racer X from Weapon X, and to then sell to those same kids a shitload of Speed Racer re-branded Hot Wheels toys. Call me crazy if you like. But just wait till this under-performing piece of shit hits DVD, and watch it again alongside these clips and tell me how crazy I really am.
There will be fans out there who may be outright angered at my assessment of this film, diehard Speed Racer fans who will no doubt say "What is the matter with you? This is a Speed Racer cartoon brought to life, what more could you want?" But that's just it. How can anyone claim that this is a cartoon come to life when 90% of it is still a cartoon? A real Speed Racer "cartoon brought to life" would have had real actors driving real cars in real locales, with sparing CGI used for the more impossible driving feats... wheel spikes, flipping over other cars, etc. But that's not what we got. This isn't a cartoon brought to life. It's Roger Rabbit in reverse. It's a 2 hour long PC game cinema scene. It's a driving-based spiritual successor to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (another film that proves audiences don't want to see live actors in CGI-generated worlds), and we can all thank George Lucas for its existence. And the Warner Brothers can thank him for the Wachowskis spending 120 million to make the film, but at best only 40 million or so of that budget made it on-screen, a thought that will really be pressing on the executive number-crunchers as they stare at that pathetic 20 million opening take. All I can say for Warner Brothers is that they'd better hope and pray to sell an assload of toys and DVDs by Christmas time, because this turkey's not going to make it to the finish line on its own.
