Sins Against Cinema movies that hate humanity (and the people that love them)

Speed Racer

seriously OMGWTFBBQ

Jesus. I must be getting old or something, but I saw this goddamned movie like a week ago and I'm just now recovering from the experience. Headaches, nausea, dizziness: maybe it's the H1N1, or maybe the Anthrax, but I'm breathing normally so it must be this... this thing. It hurts, and not in the John Cougar Mellencamp "Hurts so good" way either.

I've been accused of typing too much lately, so I'll get right to it. I'll give you a succinct, all-you-need-to-know executive summary of this movie. Here goes:

Deeply dumb stuff, made for babies.

Actually, let me amend that: deeply dumb stuff, made for dumb babies. It's all just flash! and bang! and sproing! and bright colors splashed across the screen. It's not so much a movie in the normal sense (you know, where a bunch of disparate elements come together to create a whole narrative) as just a bunch of imagery occasionally interrupted by talking. It's kind of surprising, really, coming from the brothers Wachowski. Sure, The Matrix was also deeply stupid, but it had Hugo Weaving, and cool costumes, and it was pretentious. This has no Hugo, the colors hurt my brain, and... well okay, there's a hint of pretension where Speed Racer's mom calls him an "artist", but that's all.

So, what do you get? You get a chimpanzee dressed like a little boy which just pisses me the fuck off. You get a preternaturally irritating kid. Dear god I hate that kid. You get fight scenes that mostly consist of flunkies getting kicked in the sack. You get a bunch of "racing", in that there are long, long stretches where several cars are on the screen at once, crashing into each other and making funny noises. But you have no idea of how long the courses are, or where anyone is in the standings, or anything. Everything is so frenetic, the cuts are so short, the camera is so manic that you never know where anything is or where it's going, and all tension is utterly lost in the process. But worse: It's boring. It would be bad enough if the movie were a pretty-glittery, hollow shell to house some whopper action set-pieces, but the races themselves are tedious slogs of incomprehensibility.

On the plus side, the villain looks like Christopher Hitchens, and snarls a lot. But he's underpowered, never really posing any kind of menace, and that's the worst kind of villain. John Goodman and Susan Sarandon are in this for reasons I can't wrap my head around. Stephen Colbert's Korean nemesis, Rain, plays a Japanese guy. And Christina Ricci, who is so beautiful I'd kill my entire family if she asked me to, is in this, but even she can't save it. And Matthew Fox? I can only presume after shooting four straight seasons of Lost he really, really wanted to get the hell out of Hawaii for a while. All he does is stand around and look grim.

Oh, another thing that pissed me off about this movie: when a race car blows up (which happens often) the driver is conspicuously encased in foam and ejected from the wreckage in that G.I. Joe / A-Team kiddie-show-friendly bullshit way. If little Dustin or Madelynne or whatever you're naming your kids these days can't handle the thought of people getting hurt in car wrecks, don't take them to a movie featuring thousands of car wrecks.

See? I forgot what country I live in, and I forgot that this movie was made for babies. I'm still a bit disoriented.