Motorpsycho Nightmare

[May 7th, 2008]

Late in the movie that bears his name, Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch) experiences a dark night of the soul, questioning his pursuit of a Grand Prix title and, indeed, the very purpose of his existence. This crisis comes as a surprise: For one thing, it is impossible to describe with any certainty a single event that has occurred over the previous 30 minutes. Also, prior to this moment, Speed Racer has not shown the capacity for human emotion of any kind. But here he is, bathed in computer-generated moonlight, undeniably distraught. “You tell me,” he cries, “one reason why I should go on driving!”

The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates famously decreed—but then Socrates never met Speed Racer, the character or the movie. There are no hidden depths in a cartoon originally translated from the Japanese as Mach GoGoGo. And, to their credit, directors Andy and Larry Wachowski have not tried to find any. The Wachowski brothers have twisted the plot into the most intricate, mystifying puzzle imaginable—these are the siblings who wrote The Matrix Reloaded, after all—but they have mainly concentrated on excreting a big shiny candy drop. It doesn’t taste very good, and in fact I can’t imagine any person over the age of 12 wanting the digital sugar rush to last more than about five minutes (in fact, it goes on for another 124), but it deserves a certain honor for being the summer movie most unapologetically dedicated to its surfaces. To talk about Speed Racer is not to discuss what it’s about—or, heaven forbid, what it means—but to explain what it looks like.

So, what does Speed Racer look like? It looks like a 1970s diner retrofitted as a 1950s diner by a cokehead who was not alive at any time in the 1950s. It looks like the latest upgrade of Second Life, except instead of avatars it is filled with real people, and one of them is John Goodman in an orange T-shirt. It looks like the inside of the world’s most polished pinball machine. It looks like several dozen Matchbox cars were released into the wormhole at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It looks like missing footage from Willy Wonka’s highly traumatizing ferryboat ride. It looks like an early Microsoft screen saver, complete with the two-dimensional fish and flamingos. It looks like a child’s kaleidoscope filled with Goldschläger. It looks like Arthur Fonzarelli’s acid flashback.

Somewhere inside the bells and whistles is a plot, having to do with the legacy of Speed’s older brother Rex Racer (whose name, I fear, is also his destiny), his dad John Goodman, his girlfriend Christina Ricci and his little brother, who looks uncannily like a tiny Goodman and who is easily the hammiest onscreen kid since John Hughes ceased making movies. (To make him more unbearable, the Wachowskis have given him a chimpanzee.) Everyone in the Speed Racer universe is monomaniacally dedicated to cars, a conceit that might have made more sense if Emile Hirsch displayed an ounce of charisma in the lead role. But Hirsch has the screen presence of a cherub-faced, passive pool boy; dressed in Speed’s pectoral-hugging blue polo shirt and red ascot, he appears as though he’s driving to a beach party on Fire Island, and nothing he does counters that initial impression.

In fact, once the shock of the movie’s high-tech sheen wears off, little in it is very impressive. If I thought it was destined to be a hit, I might express concern for the future of movies—but while I’m sure it will be big in Japan, I can’t imagine it grossing very high stateside. American audiences prefer their popcorn movies to maintain a safe level of intelligence and familiarity; a few minutes of Speed Racer’s resolute inanity and bizarre visuals and most will get suspicious that they’re so far ahead of the movie they might be lapping it. It’s a fair concern: You could drown in such shallowness.