Sloth

Speed Racer

What’s it about?
Here’s erstwhile Sloth contributor Peet’s summary of every Speed Racer plot ever, including this movie: “Gosh, I wonder what ever became of my brother Rex, who died under conveniently mysterious circumstances all those years ago. In a totally unrelated thought, I wonder who this Racer X guy is?”

Any chicks in the movie?
Christina Ricci, playing the role she was clearly born for: the chesty girlfriend of an anime protagonist.

Awesomeness Factor?
This may shock you, as god knows it shocked me, but I actually liked Speed Racer. Perhaps it helps that I have never actually seen more than a couple of seconds of the TV show, which even as a child seemed kinda shallow to me.* The humongous streak of anime nerdism that ran through the Matrix series is Speed Racer’s raison d’etre: the Warchowski’s turn Speed Racer into a special-effects orgy that blurs the line between animation and live-action, created I assume by force-feeding a football field’s worth of CGI programmers full of raw sugar and psychotropic drugs in roughly equal measure. Speed Racer’s visuals aren’t over-the-top, because that implies that the makers were in any way conscious of where the top was to begin with. This is a movie that laughs at the abstract concept of restraint, where race cars have the inertia of ping-pong balls as they race on tracks that look more like the Stargate sequence in 2001 than anything in the recognizable physical universe. The bits of the movie where people have to talk to each other are unimportant – the Warchowski’s are clearly incapable of expressing any human emotions except in the absolute broadest of terms – but even then there’s always the chance any given scene of boring exposition might be interrupted by a sudden ninja attack. You think I’m kidding, but John Goodman totally fights ninjas in this. NINJAS. That alone makes this better than any Michael Bay movie ever made.

Mitigated By?
Whatever you do, DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE DRUNK. Not unless you want your head to spin around like a water sprinkler**, except with whatever-made-you-drunk plus vomit instead of water. A vomit sprinkler, in other words.

* Unlike the grand, sweeping drama known as The A-Team.

** I originally had something theoretically much funnier sounding here instead of water sprinkler. I was going to say the name brand of one of those weird sprinkler toys with the crazy waiving rubber hose arms, you know? Except I can’t remember what they’re called. So then I tried to look for “water toys” on Google. With the SafeSearch filter off. And now I want to die.