I have a confession to make. In a
blatant act of generational heresy, I was never that into the Star Wars movies. When I watched Star Wars upon its 1998 re-release, I was flabbergasted that
such silly, stilted fluff could incite such feverish passion.
To me, all the fatal flaws fanboys
bitched about in regards to the prequels—stiff dialogue, wooden performances,
a convoluted plot, and mindless spectacle divorced from human
emotion—were there from the very beginning, though I quite like Empire
Strikes Back. I envied the misplaced
passion and community of Star Wars
geeks, that comforting sense of belonging that comes with knowing that you
inexplicably aren't the only Poindexter in the world who knows the identity of
the best man at Boba Fett's wedding, or who has the blueprints for the Death
Star rattling around somewhere inside your brainbone.
So throughout my filmgoing
adventures, I kept looking for a franchise that would mean to me what Star
Wars meant to so many of my peers. In 1999,
I thought I'd found it in The Matrix. The Wachowskis' iconic blockbuster combined the visceral excitement of
top-flight popcorn fare with the moody pop profundity of a great comic book. It
represented the perfect fusion of ideas and spectacle, technology and
storytelling. It was smart, it was kinetic, and it introduced countless
technological innovations—most notably the concept of "bullet time"—that
have been co-opted, stolen, and transformed into clichés in the ensuing years.
It somehow even managed to make the once and future Theodore Logan of San
Dimas, California, into a convincing action hero.
We have been inundated with so many mindless follow-ups that
the phrase "arbitrary sequel" seems inherently redundant. Sequels are, by
definition, perfunctory pieces of studio product created in a bubbling cauldron
of money-lust and shameless opportunism. Yet The Matrix begged for a sequel. It introduced such a dense, multi-layered
universe that I couldn't wait to see what happened next.
I entered The Matrix Reloaded with sky-high expectations and a palpable sense of
excitement that quickly gave way to a gnawing, empty feeling as the film sunk
further and further down a rabbit hole of unforgivable suckitude. The relatively
clear, lucid throughline of the Wachowskis' original—Everydude uncovers
dark secrets of the universe, becomes cyber-messiah—was replaced with a
muddy morass of subplots and conflicts I couldn't care less about.
Like Peggy Lee in the
Lieber-Stoller standard, at the end of The Matrix: Reloaded, I
left the theater wondering, "Is that all there is?" I felt more than just
crushing disappointment. I felt deceived. I felt angry at the Wachowskis for
tricking me into caring about a fantastical science-fiction universe that, upon
further consideration, sucked. The Matrix Reloaded plunged so deeply and irretrievably into its own
personal mythology that it lost track of the human element that made the first
film so resonant.
The Matrix famously teased and tantalized audiences with the
enigmatic tagline "What is the Matrix?" Its sequels lost and alienated fans
with wildly convoluted messes that replaced that question with a vexed "Who the
hell cares?" By the time the second Matrix sequel rolled around, I had gone from illusioned to
disillusioned, from gruntled to disgruntled. I had completely lost interest. I
couldn't even make it past the first hour of The Matrix: Honestly,
Why Are We Even Bothering Any More? As
regular readers of this column should know, I do not give up on movies very
easily. I consequently don't know how the series ends, though my editor Keith tells
me it concluded with Keanu Reeves learning that love truly is the fifth
element.
Between the release of The
Matrix and the thudding anticlimax of The
Matrix: Revolutions, the Wachowskis went
from being the wunderkinds who dreamed up an instant classic to those
self-indulgent assholes who destroyed the Matrix franchise. The Matrix trilogy still made a fuckload of money, but the
Wachowskis' status as boy wonders (almost a full decade after The
Matrix conquered the world, they're barely
into their 40s) took a massive hit.
After the rapidly diminishing
returns of The Matrix Reloaded and The
Matrix: Revolutions, the Wachowskis
masterminded V For Vendetta, then
retreated into the ostensibly safe, lucrative realm of special-effects-heavy
cartoon adaptations to bring Speed Racer to the big screen. It must have looked like a sure thing on paper: the
blockbuster creators of The Matrix revamping
a beloved cult oddity. Yet the $120 million Joel Silver production bombed
spectacularly, grossing under $19 million in its opening weekend, and sinking
like a stone immediately afterward. By the time I caught up with Speed
Racer last Thursday, it was playing only one
show a day at our local 21-screen megaplex, in the prized 1:05 p.m. slot.
I should probably concede here
that I know nothing about Speed Racer except
that it was a very popular attraction at the video store where Keith and I used
to work. It wasn't quite as popular as Clownfuckers or Bathroom Sluts 3 (though, to be fair, the concluding entry in the Bathroom
Sluts trilogy did clear up all sorts of
issues left dangling at the end of Bathroom Sluts 2) but popular all the same.
Speed Racer the movie isn't ultimately about actors or plot or
character arcs. No, it's about shiny things going zoom in happy color land.
That isn't the problem. It's everything surrounding the scenes of shiny things
going zoom that proves problematic. Speed Racer condenses several films' worth of exposition and backstory
into an opening 20 minutes that darts back and forth in time relentlessly as it
unpacks the complicated mythology of a racing dynasty called The Racers. We are
in the land of archetypes here, where names are destiny; if you're born with a
telltale moniker like Speed Racer, a humdrum career in accounting is clearly
not an option.
In a giddy sugar-rush of barely
coherent mythmaking we learn that plucky Speed Racer (played by Nicholas Elia
as a boy and Emile Hirsch as a man-child) grew up in the outsized shadow of
older brother Rex Racer, a hotshot daredevil of the racetrack who sped his way
into the history books before dying in a fiery, mysterious crash under a cloud
of suspicion. As a boy, Speed exists in a private fantasy world of speed and
adrenaline. In a nifty early sequence, he sketches a car and a racetrack, then
watches in rapt delight as his crude drawing comes to life, with himself in the
starring role. In a rhyming scene not much later, Speed's obnoxious little
brother Spritle (Paulie Litt) and his chimpanzee sidekick Chim Chim leap inside
an anime program and begin striking kung-fu poses. It was at this point that I started
thinking, "Man, I wish I was high right now. This movie is wasted on the sober
and lucid."
Speed Racer's breathless first half-hour dazzles the eye and
clouds the mind with a relentless onslaught of lurid neon, candy-colored
dreamscapes, and gaudy eye candy. Watching it is like being inside a busted
kaleidoscope. It's downright hypnotic in its sensory overload. Then, alas, the
plot begins to kick in. I have seldom seen a film so accomplished visually, yet
so unaccomplished from a storytelling and emotional perspective.
Speed Racer is aggressively, shamelessly, and purposefully
artificial. Adapting it into a roller coaster or a videogame would be
redundant; it's already a roller coaster, a videogame, and a live-action
cartoon. But it barely qualifies as a movie. After the opening frenzy of backstory
and exposition, we're catapulted to the present day, where a now-grown Hirsch
is tearing up the world of racing with a nifty little metallic phallus of a car
designed by his dad, "Pops Racer" (John Goodman).
The Racers are defiantly
independent in a world of conglomerates and compromise, but temptation comes
calling in the form of an evil tycoon (Roger Allam) desperate to recruit Hirsch
to race for him. Allam makes an indelible impression early on. Popping up at
the Racers' doorstep with a shit-eating grin, bad intentions, and a surplus of
oily charm, Allam waxes orgasmic over the breakfast prepared by Mom Racer (Susan
Sarandon). "Pancakes are love!" he gushes in a fit of Eddie Haskell-like
sycophancy. Now there's a tagline waiting to happen. Is it just me, or is Allam
a dead ringer for professional drunkard/provocateur Christopher Hitchens?
Before long, Allam's reptilian
true self oozes out. When Hirsch politely rejects his overtures, Allam's creepy
burlesque of kindness disappears, and he hips Hirsch to the way the racing
world really operates: It's a rigged
game ruled by rich old men in smoky rooms for the sole purpose of driving up
stock prices. Then Allam more or less disappears from the film, popping up from
time to time to seethe villainously and push the plot forward.
When Allam threatens to destroy
Hirsch's career, the plucky driver teams up with love interest Christina Ricci,
masked mystery driver "Racer X," and a Japanese rival played by Stephen
Colbert's arch-nemesis Rain to compete in The Crucible, the same hellish race
that killed Hirsch's brother. Or did it? Could this Racer X fellow possibly be
Rex Racer in disguise?
The Wachowskis apparently had two
very strong visions for Speed Racer that
ultimately cancel each other out. They were going to transform it into a giddy,
goofy live-action cartoon, a campy retro romp that delights in the synthetic,
shameless, and shimmering. Secondly, they were going to create a sober family
drama about a tormented, brooding young man who must overcome a formative
trauma, corporate corruption, and his father's doubts and fears in order to
realize his potential.
Alas, the Wachowskis are a lot
better at making shiny things go zoom than they are at getting audiences to
care about the people inside the shiny things. Speed Racer is a feast for the senses; every frame is filled with
neat little details competing for the audience's attention. How can the actors
playing comic-book archetypes possibly compete?
All the Wachowski brothers'
latest has going for it, ultimately, is
spectacle and speed. Yet it continually grinds to a screeching halt so Hirsch
can have heart-to-heart talks with his family and friends. It's as if the Superman ride at Great America stopped every 40 seconds
for a sentimental speech about Superman's complicated relationship with his
adopted planet, and his angst at being the only surviving member of his alien
race.
This is made grindingly apparent
by a montage late in the film where Hirsch, at a crucial crossroads in his life
and career, reflects back on the heady conversations he's had about his
family's past and his professional future. The flashbacks are supposed to lend
gravity and meaning to Hirsch's quest. Instead, they merely underline just how
spectacularly the film's emotional elements fail. It's a greatest-misses
compilation of dialogue that falls flat, too-pat emotional epiphanies, and
labored attempts at investing a pop-art cartoon with substance. It turns out
you can't be Batman & Robin and a
racing-world East Of Eden at the
same time after all.
Just about the only major
character that Hirsch doesn't have a big, clumsy, obvious emotional scene with
is Chim Chim. I wouldn't be surprised if the deleted scenes on the Speed
Racer DVD rectify this grievous oversight
with a heartwarming scene where Hirsch gazes deep into Chim Chim's
uncomprehending eyes and says "Chim Chim, when we first met, I was initially
put off by the constant screeching and feces-hurling. But you alone saw that I
had a passion for racing that couldn't be denied and an innate sense of
integrity that makes victory ultimately much sweeter." By this point, the
chimpanzee probably would have nodded off out of boredom. Who could blame him?
A lot of people hate every ape
they see, from chimpan-A to chimpan-Z. I'm not one of them. But the presence of
a zany primate in a prominent role comes at a steep price—namely the
presence of Chim Chim's constant companion Spritle, a fat, candy-crazed little
brat who's the migraine-inducing Jar-Jar Binks of the Speed Racer universe. Me-sa thinks his role should have been left
on the cutting-room floor.
Litt takes a strong, oft-reiterated
anti-girls, anti-cooties stand that the filmmakers apparently share. It's
telling that a scene where a frustrated Hirsch and Racer X (played with terse,
robotic anti-charisma by Matthew Fox) grind their gleaming metallic automotive
phalluses against each other to blow off steam is charged with far more sexual
tension than any scene involving Hirsch and Ricci. "I haven't been thrown like
that in years," Fox enthuses in a line as queasily homoerotic as anything in Top
Gun. Get a room, guys. It's safe to assume
that Hirsch can ride Fox's tail anytime.
Like Litt, Speed Racer seems to feel strongly that girls are icky. Of course
it doesn't help that Ricci has lost so much weight that she now resembles E.T.
Think about it—the giant, saucer-like eyes on a tiny oval face, the broad
forehead, the unmistakably alien air and long, elegant neck. Where have you
seen them before? I wasn't sure if Ricci was trying to try to help Hirsch win
revenge, or trying to phone her home planet.
On an equally queasy-making note,
Hirsch and his best gal look disconcertingly like each other. In a car scene at
Makeout Point, the two look less like lovers than fraternal twins, though at
this point, Hirsch might just be a little prettier than Ricci, with her
gee-whiz naiveté and dialogue straight out of Hanna Barbera's Big Book Of
Outdated '60s Slang ("Hubba hubba,"
"Jeepers," "Cool beans.") Nor is Ricci the only actor saddled with
groan-inducing one-liners. After a mysterious karate man threatens the Racers,
Ricci breathlessly asks, "Was that a ninja?" To which Goodman quips, "More like
a non-ja!"
Cinema is more than just a
universal language and a collective waking dream that crosses boundaries of
language, culture, and ideology. It's also the greatest tool ever created to
facilitate looking at boobs. The Wachowskis lost track of that with Speed
Racer to the film's detriment, creatively
and commercially. There's a
reason that people who wouldn't be able to tell Boba Fett from Bob Hope never
forget Princess Leia's gold bikini. Speed Racer never quite makes it past the "girls are gross"
stage of sexual and intellectual development.
In a strange way, the caliber of
actors in Speed Racer work against the
film. If the Wachowskis had hired cheeseballs like Casper Van Dien, George
Hamilton, and Melanie Griffith for lead roles, the "emotional" scenes
undoubtedly would have engendered great, cathartic gales of unintentional
laughter. Instead, they hired actors good enough to mitigate the camp factor,
but not good enough to imbue the drama with life or vigor.
This speaks to Speed Racer's central flaw: It's stuck somewhere between kitsch
and heavy drama, outright ridiculousness and moody intensity. It doesn't seem
to know whether to wholly embrace camp, or to keep it at arm's length, which is
not a problem any movie featuring an extended end-credit sequence with a
chimpanzee mugging for the camera should have.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret
Success: Fiasco