Speed Racer

I haven’t read any of the reviews, but apparently they’ve been pretty bad. Honestly, I don’t know what the complaints are. The film was a blast. The visuals are spectacular. The story is easy to follow (including a number of flash backs that could have easily been confusing, but were worked in beautifully). It’s incredibly faithful to the old cartoon series, but awesome. Plus, there’s a monkey fighting a ninja. It seems like it might be too long (clocks in over 2 hours), but the movie is all action and it definitely doesn’t seem like it’s that long.

I guess if you are old and stuffy, the visuals might overwhelm you enough that you can’t follow the film. So maybe that’s the problem with the reviewers? I have a feeling a lot of them made their decision based on the marketing and went in prejudiced.

I’m genuinely sad that a lot of people didn’t go see Speed Racer - Iron Man absolutely slaughtered it at the box office this past weekend. With Indy coming out next week, I’m afraid Speed just isn’t going to get a chance to shine. I’m looking forward to seeing it again - the theater we saw it at was pretty bad, so I definitely want to see it again on DLP.

So, especially if you have young (i.e., under 60) kids in the family, do yourself a favor and go check out Speed Racer.

Update: I looked over some reviews over at Rotten Tomatoes, and it seems as though I was right. The reviewers mantra seems to be “Too many colors! Too shiny!” and “I loved the cartoon and this had the same story as the cartoon so this is bad!” I normally tend to side with reviewers, but this is a case where their system fails. They, as a whole, seemed to have missed the point.

Another Edit: Oops, Indy doesn’t come out for two more weeks. Narnia next weekend. Do people care about Narnia? I don’t know how to predict that one. The first one did well enough I think. Maybe if there’s some good word of mouth Speed Racer can come out on top next weekend, but it’ll be tough. The damage is probably already done.