This past Sunday I got a chance to see Speed Racer.  I’ve been debating if I should see it or not and finally decided yes for only the reason of providing some reviews for this site.  Speed Racer is a movie that I really wasn’t looking forward too to begin with even after seeing the trailers and photos and being mildly interested in what I’ve seen.  With that mild interest, I still didn’t expect to watch a movie that I was actually going to enjoy.  I went into Speed Racer with very low expectations.  I’ve read several reviews from around the net, even though I try and keep away from them for personal reviewing reasons, and saw that basically everyone who has seen Speed Racer is simply bashing the film.  After seeing Speed Racer myself, I look back to those reviews and wondered what they were expecting.  There are a lot of reviews, mainly Internet bloggers, who make their reviews out to be like they saw The Dark Knight and it turned out to be an awful movie.  Although some reviews that I read give very good reasons for their low rating many reviews seemed to act like they had huge expectations and upon seeing Speed Racer all of their hopes and dreams were crushed.  So it comes to mind, what did anyone really expect from this movie?  Again, I went into this with very low expectations and maybe that turned out to be a good thing, because I didn’t hate it as much as everyone else did.  In fact, I didn’t hate it at all.  I actually had fun with most of Speed Racer but that doesn’t mean I thought it was good.  In the end, Speed Racer is a bad movie but I think I can appreciate it for what it is.

In short Speed Racer is a visual orgy for CGI lovers but also a visual nightmare for those who can’t handle a world that wasn’t build with hammers and wood.  My thoughts from seeing Speed Racer’s visual world are pretty simple.  Speed Racer is an amazing world, unlike anything we’ve seen before except in video games but in the end it’s just way way too much to handle.  I think the simpler the better because Speed Racer was too busy with all of the visual effects and it really cost them in the end.  It seems to me that all of the focus of Speed Racer was for the races themselves, although really cool to watch, they forgot about the rest of the movie.  Taking a really fair group of cast members and wasting their talents on dialog that young people probably wouldn’t understand anyways and only making the adult movie fan roll their eyes, and spending too much time on creating the spectacular racing events.

In some cases or maybe just one case, I feel like I’m bias in trying to review the performance of Matthew Fox.  Being such a huge fan of Fox on ABC’s Lost, knowing that Fox is an extremely talented underrated actor on that hit television series, I can’t help to think that he wasn’t that bad in Speed Racer.  Sure he was playing a role that was so ridiculous, some people might be wondering why he would even accept a role like that.  I personally like to think, that as an actor who portrays a tragic broken hero on Lost it was probably a sweet change to play something completely ridiculous that he could just have fun with and in a way, I feel that it showed in Speed Racer.  I could be imagining things but I supposed that’s just what I’d like to think.  Sometimes I don’t think the art of acting and making a award winning performance is in the mind of actors.  Upon reading the script to Speed Racer and seeing what they were expecting him to do… yea, I would have done it too, because it was probably fun.  As a little side tidbit, Keanu Reeves turned down the role of Racer X.

One of the things that was pretty good and in all honesty gave me hope was the musical score composed by Michael Giacchino.  When it comes to the score, it doesn’t matter if you liked the movie or not because the score was pretty damn good.  The reason why Michael Giacchino’s score for Speed Racer gives me hope is because, Giacchino is composing the score for Star Trek and that above all must be good and true to the film because if it isn’t, I’ll be very upset.

Without going to much further with Speed Racer, the story was very thin if not cute.  The comedy wasn’t all that impressive even though I had a giggle or two.  The acting wasn’t half bad but it didn’t help that the script and written dialog wasn’t very good.  Visually it looked great but it also too much.  Richard Roundtree makes an appearence and the only reason I mention it, is because he was once called Shaft.

Since I don’t really consider myself a movie critic, because I’m really not, and I only consider myself a simple fan of movie watching, I think I can just appreciate Speed Racer for what it is.  It’s a visual eye candy cool racing movie that involves no brain exercising but in the end after all of that, Speed Racer really isn’t all that great or good.  If you don’t have a young kid to bring, don’t bother and wait for it to be released on a movie channel.  It’s also worth noting, that this movie has completely bombed its opening weekend.  On a budget that is rumored at $100 million, it only made $18.5 million opening weekend.  Wow… On a scale of 1 to 10, Speed Racer gets a 4.5 at best because overall, since I didn’t expect much to begin with, I simply just had fun with the races.

-Phil

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