Speed Racer - The Filthy Critic

Speed Racer, as viewed by The Filthy Critic

"The only reason for Speed Racer is nostalgia. It sure as hell isn't because the old TV show was so good or powerful that someone felt a new generation needed to be told the tale of the boy who raced a lot and mostly won. That's probably because it was a really stupid tale. The original cartoon was fucking dreadful. Bad animation, lame, repetitive jokes, stale characters and some of the shittiest dialog outside of German industrial films. Anyone who tells you otherwise is deluded by some sad notion that his childhood was idyllic. Probably, he's not even thinking that the show was great, just that his life was better back then. Back then his mother bought his sugared cereal and did his laundry and he had yet to be rejected by women. None of that had anything to do with Speed Racer, but nostalgia is all about associating objects with some vague feeling that you once had a good time in life, and you are no longer capable of doing that."

"The movie is divided into two distinct pieces. The first is painfully long, unbearably boring deserts of dialog that the bad actors have to trek across. Characters talk intensely and too much about the stock market, old races and racers, corporate buyouts and industrial manufacturing. The story is too detailed, and yet simplistic and retarded. Pushing Speed Racer is that old hollywood chestnut about how big business is evil and the little independent has spunk and nobility. That horseshit always means so much more when it's told to us by a bigass studio in a mega-budgeted action flick milking a tired franchise for more than it's worth."