I never reviewed Iron Man, I know. Wanna know why? Because it's not worth my time to review it. IT IS SO AWESOME IT NEEDS NO REVIEW. It is the perfect Marvel superhero film. (It may even be better than Batman Begins - MAYBE.) If you haven't seen it, you are probably in some kind of coma or something. Sick of films based on other media that are not faithful to their source material? Well, Iron Man is as accurate to the comic as physically possible. Seriously. Go see it. NOW.So, on to Speed Racer, which I felt it important to weigh in on because I've read a lot of negative reviews. Basically, this film's been getting a lot of bad buzz and half-star reviews from critics, and the marketing hasn't been great and I saw the action figures in the store and they look like I sculpted them out of Play-Doh when I was eight. It's a bad scene all around for this film, which is unfortunate because it's actually pretty decent. The Wachowski Brothers (?) really knocked it out of the park with this one.
Now I know, you're going "whoa, whoa, did you just say that Speed Racer was a good movie?" Yes, yes I did. The visuals are insane, the casting and characterizations are perfect, the film is slavishly faithful to the tone and story of the original anime...I mean, seriously. This is a pretty awesome summer, so far, what with us being 2 for 2 so far in films faithful to source material.Emile Hirsch makes a pretty good Speed Racer, but it's the cast around him that really shines. Matthew Fox makes an awesome Racer X, Susan Sarandon does a great job with her few scenes, and John Goodman would have stolen the film with his turn as Pops, except for the fact that Paulie Litt's Spritle and the real chimp playing Chim Chim kept stealing scene after scene. Christina Ricci was pretty good as Trixie, and Roger Allam (Prothero from the Wachowski-produced V for Vendetta) is just the slimiest bad guy evar. Sadly, the awesome Hiroyuki Sanada was woefully underused in a tiny role. Michael Giacchino's music uses all the old cues from the cartoon. If you've watched a bunch of episodes of the anime at any point in your life, you may well experience a slight nostalgia overload. It really is the cartoon brought to life. I mean, when my biggest gripe about the visuals is that Inspector Detector wasn't quite the linebacker he was from the cartoon and maybe his beard was a bit off, you know it's pretty close to the original.
But what's really important here is the live-action-anime CG stuff. Does it look like a video game? Yeah, I guess, but it's a pretty awesome video game with a fairly decent narrative, so I'm not sure it's a bad thing. I mean, it's not like it looks like Pole Position or something, video games have awesome graphics nowadays. The look of the film is pretty amazing, especially on an IMAX screen. Seriously, this film looks like ten kinds of crazy, in a good way.
Is this film perfect? By no means. Listen, the critics weren't wrong in a lot of their complaints. Speed Racer is probably about half an hour too long, especially for a film that's primarily targeted at kids. 2 hours 15 minutes is kind of a long time to ask kids to sit there and watch Roger Allam prattle on about fixing races to devalue stocks. Which is the other big problem. I certainly don't have an issue with labyrinthine plot structure, but this isn't a David Mamet film, it's Speed Racer. Ten minute stretches of exposition are a bit much. These issues seemed to kill the film for a lot of people. I think I was too busy watching John Goodman pantsing ninjas, I mean for serious.
Also, Chim Chim throws his poo. YES, WE HAVE MONKEYS THROWING POO IN THIS FILM. This alone gives Speed Racer an automatic pass in my book. They could have put Kirsten Dunst in this thing and I would have still probably liked it.
Ultimately, Speed Racer is going to tank hard and may never make its money back. This is unfortunate, because we may never see this style of hyper-real filmmaking again. I've seen the film compared to Tron in a number of sources, and I think the comparison is accurate. Tron was waaay ahead of its time and tanked at the box office as well. Now it is considered a cult classic. I think Speed Racer is headed in the same direction.
Speed Racer deserves to be seen in the best theater available. If you miss its theatrical run, you will be disappointed later when you inevitably watch it on your crappy television at home. Consider yourself warned on this point. You're going to walk into Best Buy one day and they'll be playing Speed Racer on all the HD TV sets and you'll be like, "Gee, maybe I should have seen that in the theater, it looks crazy."
Yes, you should have. It is.
3 comments:
The Wachowski bros certainly put a lot of effort into making Speed Racer... the movie overall looked and felt like a cross between anime, a kaleidoscope, that Flintstones movie, a video game and the Dukes of Hazard
It was exactly like one of those kickass video games with the celebrity voice actor cut scenes in between races/fights/whatever. I had no problem at all with the plot and the pacing, and that's probably why. Some stuffy old critics complained that it was like watching someone else play a video game, but I happen to enjoy watching other people play video games, thank you very much!
If they'd marketed this properly, every fanboy and fangirl on the planet would have seen it by now. (I mean, come on, Sanada wasn't even in the trailer. I know he's onscreen for ten seconds, but he's AWESOME.)
I think that SPEED RACER turned out to be a lot better than the critics made it out to be. Granted, it is flawed - probably a little more so than IRON MAN, which had its few flaws - but I think it's a pretty damn good movie and very entertaining.
As for the running time, I don't think it needed to be cut short. Some of the HARRY POTTER movies are a lot longer. The problem is that the last half hour of the film was not really paced properly.
But despite this, I feel that SPEED RACER is another good movie for the summer. It's a pity that between the bad reviews from critics and the poor marketing, it will not go very far.
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