Mostly, however, we’re stuck in a single dimension: Speed and co. The easy comparison would be to video games (one track on which Speed races looks more than a little like the Rainbow Road level from Mario Kart 64), but one or two moments provide a hint of actual cinema - a parallel edited scene, for example, of Speed pitting himself against idolized dead brother Rex’s (Scott Porter) record time, with past and future compared, combined and then split apart. Susan Sarandon and John Goodman as Speed’s mom and pop bring a seriousness to the art of acting that the film probably doesn’t deserve, though what the Wachowskis truly care about is implementing their special brand of constant motion. Emile Hirsch possesses a greaser-inflected, empty-headed steeliness as the titular boyish hero, while Christina Ricci’s round features (eyes, cheeks, even mod-ified hair) make her the perfect anime girlfriend come to life.
It certainly couldn’t be more perfectly cast. logo at the beginning of the film), the film is, at heart (if it has one), a delirious, vapid cartoon that just happens to star human beings. The meretricious smash-the-system lip service of The Matrix and V for Vendetta, which the Wachowskis scripted, has been thankfully and actually refreshingly cast aside: Speed Racer espouses some sort of vague, convolutedly plotted anti-establishment critique of corporate intrusion into the purity of sport, but hollow protest aside (try to ignore that enormous Warner Bros. It’s a style befitting its gizmo-aided and physically impossible auto-racing subject matter as well as the source material, the Sixties Japanese anime revived in recent years by kitsch-friendly nostalgia (peak period: early to mid-Nineties, when Eric Stolz’s slacker dope dealer could be seen sporting a Speed Racer T-shirt in that unmatched bible of hip, Pulp Fiction). And that’s what Speed Racer, the first film they’ve directed since the anticlimactic 2003 releases of the second and third installments of The Matrix franchise, openly heralds: worship of an almost completely digitized, green-screened, synthetic world - a virtual universe existing unto itself with no real referents beyond and no air within.įlattening screen space with live-action/CGI mash-ups, retro-futuristic candy-colored pop art décor and screen wipes led by cut-out character heads speaking in uppercase comic-strip declarations - a sort of back-and-forth curtain of moving, exclamatory faces - the Wachowski Brothers have created an all-encompassing paean to unobstructed kineticism. From the start, Andy and Larry Wachowski have been full of it - they never really wanted to fight the Matrix, they wished to become its servants.
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