Speed Racer
The Wachowski siblings do not have a particularly good track record, but sometimes I think it’s because we expect all of their films to be more like The Matrix. Speed Racer was their first post-Matrix release, and it’s certainly a different kind of movie.
Emile Hirsch is the titular Speed Racer, an 18 year old lover of racing who works at Racer Motors with his two parents (John Goodman and Susan Sarandon). The film follows the adventures of Speed as he faces his desire to drive, and the temptation of beginning to race for a major corporation (headed by the delightfully smarmy Roger Allam), all the while haunted by the death of his elder brother Rex.
The Wachowskis take the idea of anime adaptation very seriously, and that’s what we get in this film: a live action anime. With an almost terrifying color scheme and characters that look like they’ve jumped from the pages of a manga, Speed Racer is a strange and fascinating exercise in what movies (and CGI) can do. The cars race and rip around tracks impossible in the real world, the revving of engines punctuated by flashing lights and stylized dialogue.
It’s hard for the Wachowskis to beat The Matrix, and I don’t really think they’re trying to. They made a very different type of film here. While it is not uniformly successful, it does deserve greater recognition than it has hitherto received.
