Speed Racer: Critic Reviews

Young boys are the only suitable audience for Speed Racer, and even they might feel an urge to squirm between the videogame-style, whizbang, jellybean-colored, CG-jiggered car races that are the adrenalized heart of this entertainment with no soul.

Speed Racer sets out to honor and refresh a youthful enthusiasm from the past and winds up smothering the fun in self-conscious grandiosity.

You have to be 12 to like it, and I have to say there is little or nothing here to remind us why we were all quite so excited about The Matrix.

For a movie about velocity, the excitement factor is low and the races feel like a drag.

A frenetic, densely layered, narratively scrambled blob of moviemaking that will leave viewers alternately baffled and sensorially stunned.

The movie demands you be a glutton for sensation and then has the nerve to ask why you're not hungrier.

Ideologically anti-corporate, previous Wachowski productions aspired to be something more than mind-less sensation; Speed Racer is thrilled to be less. It's the delusions minus the grandeur.

Writer-directors Larry and Andy Wachowski, the creators of the Matrix films, once again invent stunning visual tricks in this adaptation of the late-'60s Japanese anime.

This toxic admixture of computer-generated frenzy and live-action torpor succeeds in being, almost simultaneously, genuinely painful -- the esthetic equivalent of needles in eyeballs -- and weirdly benumbing, like eye candy laced with lidocaine.

It gave me a headache, a stomach ache and the less-defined unease that comes from witnessing a major change in the zeitgeist. Because the zeitgeist, judging from this movie, now embraces rattle-headed visual delirium at all costs.

This is a movie that is giddily, gorgeously overwhelming, from the cool slow-motion to the Kubrick cartoons to the wormhole pyrotechnics to the kaleidoscopic bliss.

Sugar, not petrol, is the fuel that comes to mind watching candy-hued, visually hyperactive, narratively sputtering Speed Racer.

It's an eyesore, a shambles, with incoherent action and ear-buckling dialogue.

I reckon the M.P.A.A. should use the advent of Speed Racer to revive an old ratings symbol: a big Roman X, meaning 'of no conceivable interest to anyone over the age of ten.'

Speed Racer is a manufactured widget, a packaged commodity that capitalizes on an anthropomorphized cartoon of Capitalist Evil in order to sell itself and its ancillary products.

At its best, it's buoyant pop entertainment focused on three things: speed, racing and retina-splitting oceans of digitally captured color.

The Matrix creators Andy and Larry Wachowski barrel through this adaptation of the 60s animated series, hoping perhaps that no one will notice the story is as flat as roadkill.

Speed Racer offers a crazy, turbo-charged mix of cartoon kitsch, gamer action, and a wild new way to think of -- and look at -- movies.

An eye-popping, day-glo videogame that's as emotionally empty as it is visually exhilarating, Speed Racer is style, style, style without substance, but then it moves so fast that many may not care.

Ultimately, Speed Racer comes down to the lesson your parents taught you: Despite the flash, looks aren't everything.

I can sit through just about anything, but I draw the line at two hours and 15 minutes of fuchsia vomit. To suffer through this kind of hell, movie critics deserve combat pay.

Pure cotton candy -- entirely non-nutritious but too sweet and pretty for young people to resist.

The movie makes you crave a streamlined story, interesting characters and a joystick.

Any film fan will appreciate the Wachowskis' vision of this alternate universe that's every bit as densely textured and as pan-Asian/pan-planetary in its casting as The Matrix.

The movie, unfortunately, doesn't make that leap from sensation to art, but it suggests fascinating possibilities for moviemakers interested in using the latest techniques seriously to explore the world -- the fairyland we have made with our technology.