Presented as an adult action movie of sorts, it just looked terribly gaudy and nonsensical and I was not surprised when it got a critical mauling on its release in the UK. I remember seeing the trailer for this film and both me and my girlfriend turned to one another and simply said in unison that Speed Racer "looks awful". An offer from one of the largest firms in the sport appears but Speed soon learns that the sport he loves is not as pure or as clean as it is for him. As an adult he appears to have the racing world at his feet, with only the limited resources of his father's company as a constraint. However when Rex is revealed as corrupt he is thrown from the sport and is eventually killed in a deadly cross-country race devastating his family but yet purring Speed on to continue his brother's legacy, believing him to have been wrongly accused.
Somehow I managed to make it to the end, but never again.Īs a child Speed Racer not only had his name as a developmental factor in his passion for motor racing, but also the influence of his older brother and famous driver Rex Racer. Unsurprisingly the acting is terrible and the run-time is interminable, leaving me very tempted to switch this off partway through. The bad guys are completely lame and half the running time seems to be given over to some would-be comedy antics involving a fat kid and a chimpanzee. The story is some clichéd old nonsense about a guy whose older brother dies in a racing accident, so of course he himself becomes a racer. In any case, this is one of the worst I've ever seen. The graphics are worse than in many modern computer games, and given the predominance of computer graphics throughout I'm left wondering why they just didn't make an all-out animated movie. It's so bad because it's a film made entirely via CGI and greenscreen, so that everything you see in the movie is fake, too bright, too colourful, too unrealistic. Or that there were some decent actors in support, including John Goodman and a briefly glimpsed Hiroyuki Sanada. Or that the guys behind it were the Wachowski brothers, who of course made the fairly decent MATRIX films all those years ago. After watching this, I can't actually believe it was funded or made.