Octopunk sez: Speed Racer rocks!

(2008) ****

Sometimes I feel kind of sorry for the Wachowski brothers. Maybe it's because they set the bar so high for themselves with The Matrix that the sequels could only disappoint. Maybe it's because in the four years between The Matrix and Reloaded so many movies copied their visual narrative language that it was easy for people to forget they wrote that language and spoke it best. Maybe it's because they're clumsy enough as artists that they'll never get back the seamless mesh of plot, character and theme that emerged in The Matrix. But mainly it's because people seem to see those things and not notice that the main currency the Wachowskis spend is AWESOME. They know how to create brand, spanking new kinds of AWESOME and make sure they put it in their movies, and that's why I will always buy a ticket.

In three parts, I will now try to convice you to buy one too.

Part one: The laundry list of the non-awesome things you will see in Speed Racer. Probably the best way to think of this is that there will be several opportune times to go to the bathroom.

-- The script, plot, performances etc. are all just fine, if not awesome or particularly original. My one nitpick is that certain key background characters would be mentioned but not actually shown to us, and when that character was mentioned or shown to us later it was a bit confusing. (Okay, I'm pretty sure there were two Asian industrialists in the flick and I kind of got them confused. My bad, maybe.)

-- Is it me or is there a strange trend these days to spend most of a movie right up in the characters' faces? I recall the same thing in Spider-Man 3, just lots of shots in with an actor's face taking up most of the screen. I saw Speed Racer on an IMAX screen, which I highly recommend, although it may exacerbate what I'm talking about. Seeing a three-story high Matthew Fox or Emile Hirsch face is fine, but John Goodman and Roger Allam (the Tim Curryish villain) should never have their faces so inflated. Even Christina Ricci, whose alien beauty I've always been a fan of, looks a little off -- I think her tight bob haircut makes her face look unnaturally large.

-- It also may be a function of the wipes, that there are a lot of headshots because countless times a character's image tracking across the screen reveals a different image behind them. This isn't such a bad technique, but it might remind you unpleasantly of Ang Lee's Hulk.

-- Yeah, it's for the kids, so there's a good deal of excess Fat Kid and Monkey. So sometimes the flick might veer away on you while you watch them caper around, or they might turn an otherwise decent fight sequence into something way too silly, and I don't recommend watching the credits because it's just more monkey-capering. All I can say is please don't let this kill the movie for you, just close your eyes and think of the Awesome.

Part two: The mystical candyland world in which this all takes place.

I'll admit I was very worried about this. My least favorite thing in V for Vendetta were the Matrix-style tracer effects following the daggers V threw, and that's what I didn't want. I saw the Speed Racer trailers and I saw the orgy of headlight lens flare, taillight trails, neon lights and flourescent colors and I worried they were going to throw in a bunch of extra little moving details for "effect." There's a car commercial featuring some red SUV thing that had a lot of this.

I was also worried because some of my bad reaction to the new Star Wars trilogy had to do with the unreality I felt between the actors and the environments, the effect about which one reviewer wrote "it seems as if the actors have stepped within extremely detailed paintings." And every Speed Racer review I read describing the garishly unreal setting made me worry I'd hate it.

Well, I loved it. And I loved it for the same reason I didn't like Transformers so much: really good decisions about the details. The tiny details, the pixel-level decisions about what this place will look like. It turns out this wasn't the same challenge facing the Star Wars trilogy; Speed Racer is not trying to convince you a fantastic setting is photorealistic. Instead it's more like Sin City, where they draft a fantastic style and throw it on a screen. The result cuts a perfect line between real and unreal, I found myself resenting none of the decisions at play; the cars look real and no effect looks gratuitous. Actually, every effect looks gratuitous, but they're so perfectly placed. This is what I mean when I say the Wachowski brothers know what they're doing.

It's also worth noting, once again vs. the embattled prequel trilogy, that a number of times they actually went and built the sets for some of these eye-popping rooms, instead of painting every damn thing in CG. For me, it makes a huge difference.

Part three: Car-fu. Aka, the AWESOME.

I never really watched the Speed Racer cartoon very much, and one reason I never glommed onto it is, well, it's just a guy in a car. Speed would drive through dense forests with those buzzsaws out front, or close the bubble top and tool around on the ocean floor, and even as a kid I'd think "He's gonna bottom out on a stump or a rock or something. This is stupid." The automotive acrobatics had the logic of a kid driving a toy car around on the arm of the couch, jumping to the coffee table, etc. Silly.

The best thing the Wachowskis did here was say "Silly? Not so." They spare us the forest and the ocean floor, but then find a way to make these vehicles move like two-ton ninjas. Drivers hit their built-in jump jacks and put their cars into deliberate spins so they can whack the other guy's car just so before they straighten out, then they drive backwards and dodge missles and flip their cars sideways and backwards and it is just SO FREAKING AWESOME you have to go see it. For anyone with a taste for action movies, this is required viewing.

Anyway, I had a really good time. The kid and the monkey will make you groan, but the visuals and the automotive combat more than make up for it. It's something you've never seen before, and that is so, so worth seeing on a big screen. If you wait for dvd to see this I just know you'll say "I should've listened to Octopunk!" and then you'll turn around and I'll be there, folding my arms and nodding.

Two afterthoughts:

Matthew Fox was great as Racer X, just loving to kick ass and never once doing that Jack from Lost thing where he looks away all tortured.

Reviewers love to use the standard go-to of bitterly comparing a cinematic action sequence to a video game. Someday they might realize that's not necessarily a bad thing.