I’m amazed to say this, but a film based on a television cartoon, a film with an excess of production energy and an equally-excessive layer of dipshit dialogue, a film edited with an eye toward epileptic shock, a film with a lot of jokes predicated on a hammy fat kid, a film with about fifty chimpanzee reaction shots …. it isn’t half-bad. In fact, it’s maybe three-quarters-good. I had steeled myself for teeth-gritting ennui as Max stared with empty goggle eyes through the 2+ hours of frantic Speed Racer nonsense. But this film was incessantly pleasing to the eye, a candy-store of colors, clever anime-inspired and/or loopily-inventive cinematic tricks, and uncampy affectionate recreation of mediocre-cartoon tropes. I hereby nominate Spritl and Chim as easily the most entertaining “irritating-kid-and-animal sidekicks” in the history of cinema, by which I mean the only irritating-kid-and-animal sidekicks one would even want to see. Anthony Lane in the New Yorker repeats an old Groucho Marx joke as a way of criticizing the film’s primary audience as four-year-olds — I guess I’m in touch with my inner four-year-old, ’cause this was way more fun than anyone has a right to expect.
Oh, and the central notion that corporations are evil was a pleasant ‘though (see Iron Man discussion) self-contradicting message for a big-budget technospectacle to embrace. There was surprisingly little (if any?) product-placement in the film (‘though the ramped-up pitch to kids for all things Speed began at the ticket counter, where we all got “Pit Passes” with coupons for Target and Hot Wheels).