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Every year,
there seems to be one movie released that simply mystifies the
viewer solely through its technical mastery. This movie isn’t a
spectacle simply because it is full of flashy and impressive
special effects; it bends all of the rules of traditional
filmmaking as we know it. Last summer, this film came in the
form of The Bourne Ultimatum, a picture that contained so
many handheld shots and complicatedly-staged action sequences
that it was jarring to think about the levels of intricacy and
continuity that director Paul Greengrass and his team had to
account for when making it. This time around, the film is the
Wachowski Brothers’ Speed Racer, a hundred-million-dollar
adaptation of the popular age-old Japanese cartoon that
accomplishes so much more than the casual filmgoer might’ve
thought possible. Shot entirely on green-screens and filled in
with CGI backgrounds, the movie takes the idea of futuristic
automobile racing and a modernized 1950s-esque setting to a
colorful, stupefying level that is rather miraculous to
experience.
But the magic
of the film can’t even be narrowed down simply to its visual
appearance. Critic Eugene Novikov of FilmBlather.com hits the
nail on the head when he writes in his review: “It's not only
the look of any particular shot that's remarkable, but the way
the film moves: people and objects fly across the frame,
effortlessly transitioning from one shot to the next;
perspectives shift in completely unexpected ways; the background
whips in and out of focus depending on the motion in the
foreground. It's an attempt to replicate the look of the
original Speed Racer anime cartoon, but I've seen the
cartoon, and it didn't look like this.” Indeed, Speed
Racer is something otherworldly. Viewers may get headaches
after watching the characters and the action zoom every which
way for the film’s whopping two-hour-and-fifteen-minute
running-length, but they certainly won’t be able to deny the
sheer fluid power of what they’ve witnessed.
Yes, I did just
say the movie runs for two hours and fifteen minutes. It’s
undeniably much too long given that its one-note story is about
a young man named Speed (Emile Hirsch) who wants nothing but to
race his super-car. Even when the Wachowskis throw in a major
plot-thread involving corrupt businessman E.P. Royalton (a
fantastic Roger Allam) and his attempts to sabotage Speed’s
career because Speed won’t sign with his commercial racing-team,
the exercise remains incredibly thin for one of such
grandiosity. Another glaring issue of the same sort is the fact
that the actual racing sequences, which run for considerable
amounts of time in and of themselves, don’t seem climactic
enough because the rest of the film is equally as visually
mind-blowing and emotionally-exiting. In fact, I found myself
more involved by the scenes in which Speed’s family dynamics
were explored (especially those involving his girlfriend, Trixie,
played by a very sexy Christina Ricci) because they were every
bit as high-octane as their acceleration-filled counterparts but
also more thematically-substantive.
Nonetheless, it
remains hard to gripe about Speed Racer’s faults for too
long because the movie is so innovative. Even if it isn’t
entirely successful, Speed Racer continues endless push
to reinvent the way audiences think about cinema in the
conventional sense—far more than the Wachowskis’ lauded
Matrix ever did, anyway—and that’s always a good thing for
the art-form as a whole. Yes, Iron Man may still be the
best popcorn-flick released in Summer 2008 thus far, but
Speed Racer makes for a well-deserved runner-up.
-Danny Baldwin,
Bucket Reviews
Review Published
on: 5.11.2008
Screened on:
5.9.2008 at Grauman's Chinese in Hollywood, CA.
Speed Racer is rated PG and runs 135
minutes.
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