Go, Speed, Go!

Speed Racer couldn’t have surprised me more if the opening credits revealed my own name listed as director.

Now, ask yourself, and answer honestly, how much were you expecting really? Whatever your answer is, it wasn’t this: a high-octane, nitrous-injected thrill ride on rails. An explosion of color and sound at Mach 5. A riot-stomping race adventure pre-wired for an Xbox controller.

Filled with seizure-inducing color best viewed from orbit with super-duty sunglasses and supersonic computer animation, Speed Racer was not supposed to be this visually mesmerizing. And admittedly, it is a horrible movie, but it’s the way it presents campy horribleness that is so admirable. It acknowledges the source material — a cruddy cartoon from Japan called Mach GoGoGo!, a title Russ Meyer would appreciate — only to chew it up, re-shape it and then spit it out no better, and quite possibly worse, than the way it went in.

In a racing league no longer impressed with NASCAR’s boring oval tracks, racers drive courses that resemble Matchbox toy tracks: high-banking turns, vertical climbs, loops, corkscrews, jumps, plummeting divebombs and the occasional funnel of spikes. With more maneuvering required, the drivers implement their cars with various skid pads, catapults and retractable feet — someone very clever has already dubbed the effect of these Matrix-inspired add-ons as “car-fu.” So, as you can imagine, driving isn't 100 percent of this sport if only because all four tires are rarely on the road surface. The cars bump and grind, and when the road limits their movements the drivers click a button on their steering wheel launching them upward in wire-fu slow-mo as if Yuen Wo Ping had channeled Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon through the Grand Prix.

The star of this league is young driver Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch), who better be glad that he wasn’t a carpenter with that name — although drug dealer would have been appropriate. Speed has turned down a sponsorship deal so lucrative that the sponsor company, Royalton Industries, must destroy him on the race track just for refusing. Royalton, and its boob of a CEO, has a long history of rigging races, buying finishes and controlling the grid to boost its stock. When Speed refuses to be a cog in the Royalton machine he threatens to unseat decades worth of crooked history and rigged races.

Helping Speed maneuver around dirty drivers and fixed races is Racer X, a mysterious opponent whose name sounds nothing at all like the name of Speed’s deceased brother, Rex Racer. Speed Racer and Racer X, besides being able to borrow each other’s stationary, battle their way through the grid to prove that racing isn’t about winning, but connecting spiritually with the road — call it vehicular nirvana. Their passion and talent seems to balance well with the flick's Star-Wars-imperial-senate-like plot, which consists of a lot of politics projected onto high-dollar special effects.

Hirsch (Into the Wild) looks a little like the cartoon Speed. That’s nothing, though, compared to Lost’s Matthew Fox, whose profile looks so much like Racer X’s that it’s uncanny. Christina Ricci plays Trixie, Speed’s eye-in-the-sky navigator. Ricci’s beautiful eyes, as big as hubcaps, look more anime than most real anime. She’s found her calling: Japanese cartoon princess. And speaking of anime, Japanese cartoon characters (blame it on translation technicalities) have the worst diction — run-on sentences, no comprehension of commas or periods, mumbling and bumbling sheets of dialogue. The film may borrow from the cartoon, but its grammar and comma/period usage have improved remarkably.

Speed Racer is one of the most colorful films ever created; mosaics of Skittles have not looked this vibrant. Compound the speed of the cars and those brilliant Tide-worthy colors with a hyper-edited structure — the whole movie is in a constant transition with images overlapping, fading in and out, careening together — and what you get is more like a hallucination than a movie. It also feels a lot like a video game, but for once that seems appropriate. Visually, the whole thing is insane … but wonderfully so. And with so much computer animation I really doubt there was ever a real car on the set except to shuttle the secretive directors, Andy and Larry/Lana Wachowski, to their hotels and back again. So it's completely fake, but then again, who cares? It feels fast and that’s paramount.

But since we're on the subject of its fakeness, let's dissect: the cars can drive just as fast in reverse, they can flip and twirl to avoid sideswipes, they can drive up walls, down cliffs, swing balls of spikes, use bullet-time to dodge rockets and buzzsaws, and hop like kangaroos across a track. All this from the same guy/gal/siblings/whatever who brought us The Matrix — the only thing it was missing was Neo and Trinity hacking the underworld in zero-G. Had it been realistic in any way, though, and it would have lost its muscle, and its zing. So if there's a sequel I expect more of the same and not a stop sign on the digital horizon.

It is with great care — and knowing that somewhere in a damp Star Trek-decorated basement a geek’s heart cries in agony — that I write that the original Speed Racer cartoon is one of the worst ever created. Maybe that’s why it was so popular. This new Speed Racer is an elaborate fantasy of the original. It uses (and overuses) all the elements of the cartoon — including Speed’s brother, Spritle, and his primate buddy, Chim Chim — in just such a way that it pays respect to the cartoon, but also distances itself from it. Self-hating homage or not, it’s delicious fun, the kind of movie that will look righteous on your Blu-Ray system in four months.

Speed Racer is my first guilty pleasure this summer. I won’t promise the same for other adults, but your 12-year-olds will love it.