Speed Racer had a lot going for it: racing, gadgets, cars, and action. The cars were awesome, and the races were comprised of astounding car battles. Imagine Nascar and The Road Warrior having super-charged demon babies. And these babies are cocaine addicts. These parts are fantastic, magificent, ordeals but they don't edit out the bad parts of the movie. Luckily, I started to ignore everything I didn't want to see. All I remember were the cool car battles. And I saw the movie twice. And I enjoyed it twice. I have to commend the music, as it was moving, imaginative, and everything I wanted from an auditory experience. I also have to commend the fact that there's no song on the soundtrack just for the kid and the monkey, which were probably the worst parts of the film. Had they been cut, or at least reduced, then I think people could have gotten into the film more.
I can see how the movie fell flat for others, and couldn’t be approached well, because the Wachowskis tried making a movie that felt like a sample of the entire original series. I think the biggest problem that the movie and the terrible, terrible, marketing was that they didn’t know what kind of movie Speed Racer was supposed to be. And really, the people who are spending money to see your film don’t want to see a child and monkey ruin their 9 dollars worth.
Here’s a solution, Wachowskis. Hire a good professional writer, because you fuckers lucked out with The Matrix.
- Leo
After seeing the 35% rating that that RT gave the movie, I was a little taken aback, it was hard seeing why everyone would seem to hate this movie so much. But if you look a little closer, you’ll notice that the RT community rating is actually somewhere around 77%. This means that the target audience actually thought for the most part it wasn’t bad, but “top critics” decided that it should be rated into oblivion.
This movie was not made to appeal to the type of people who are usually movie critics in U.S. It was geared toward a very different audience, particularly, the young adult community who has experience with Japanese cinema, particularly, in the aspect of anime. I can practically guarantee that 80% of these “top critics” have not cared to watch any anime on a regular basis, nor should they have to. It’s not their arena, they are paid to review major films on the U.S. market, and anime is not prominent enough (yet) to warrant their attention. The colors and speed lines that so many people griped about was something that I had come to see as commonplace in the course of my experience with Japanese pop media, and the storyline was nowhere neat a “convoluted” as other make it out to be.
This is where the critics have failed in their job. They watched the movie, and they were way out of their comfort zone. They must have realized that this film was created for an audience that they have never had a connection with. But instead of admitting that fact, they chose to hate it, as something radically different from the same stuff that they were so used to seeing in the theaters. They touted it as a failure in attempting to deliver never before seen styles, but they didn’t even realize that these styles had already been in use for decades in Japan. They rated it down from the standpoint of themselves being the target audience, while ignoring the hundreds of thousands of youths like myself who were immersed in a different culture than them.
Having said all that, Speed Racer is not the greatest movie ever, nor does it feel like it has to try for that spotlight. It is a straightforward movie about a hero’s journey to pursue his dreams packed with fantastic visuals and some cheesy gags here and there. But if you give it a chance, it will do exactly what it sets out to do, and that is to let you have fun.
- Ling
