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May 7, 2008

What were they thinking/smoking?

It is hard to figure out what audience “Speed Racer” was made for.
The $120 million production from the writing-directing team of Andy and Larry Wachowski has incomprehensible plotting, nauseating Day Glo colors and strobe-light editing that recall those “head” movies of the 1960s and ’70s that were intended to be seen after smoking a joint or dropping some acid (i.e. the midnight movie favorite “El Topo” or the final 15 minutes of “2001”).
And yet, the PG-rated film is being marketed by Warner Bros. as a family movie.
At the Manhattan screening I attended last night, reviewers were encouraged to bring up to five “family” members along, but after the two-hour-and-10-minute assault on my eyes and ears, my first thought was what kind of family would sit through such an incoherent mess. (If I hadn’t been blocked into the center of a crowded row, I would have headed for the exit doors long before the end).
The frenetic cutting and absence of any recognizeable human behavior on screen made it seem like some sort of sophisticated brain-washing tool designed to sell God-knows-what (very much in the vein of that crazy subliminal “test” the potential assassins are given in the 1974 paranoia classic, “The Parallax View”).
“Speed Racer” hangs several wonderful actors out to dry. In the title role, Emile Hirsch — so good in “Into the Wild” — is so plastic-looking that he could be one of those Disneyland animatronic creations they used to have in the Hall of Presidents. Susan Sarandon looks suitably dazed (and airbrushed) as the neo-1950s suburban mom who keeps encouraging her son to try to kill himself in one of the insane races.
Pity the millions of children — and their squirming parents — who will be subjected to this nightmarish concoction beginning Friday.

Posted by Joe on May 7, 2008 4:04 PM

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Posted by: lisa scottoline at May 8, 2008 2:07 PM

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