Color it bad

'Speed Racer' an empty exercise in bright style

A week or so before seeing the DayGlo disaster that is "Speed Racer" I came upon a 1935 essay by then-New York Times film critic Andre Sennwald titled "The Future of Color."

Sennwald wrote, in part, "The major hazard is that this precious new element may fall into the hands of the unlettered and cause such a rape of the laws of harmony and contrast, such a blare of outrageous pigmentations, that only the color-blind will consider it safe to venture inside a motion picture theatre."

"Speed Racer" doesn't quite rape the laws of harmony and contrast, but its candy-colored garishness could be considered a violation. The really unfortunate thing is that the assaultive color scheme is the most interesting element of the movie.

An overwritten, frantically stylized adaptation of the 1960s anime television series from Japan, "Speed Racer" may add a few colors to the rainbow, but it adds nothing to the movies. And revolutionary filmmaking is what we've come to expect from directing siblings Andy and Larry Wachowski, who redefined action cinema with their "Matrix" pictures.

Indeed, even though "Speed Racer" is built around auto races, that highway car chase in "The Matrix Reloaded" has more heart-in-your-throat thrills than all of this new film.

Emile Hirsch stars as the title character, a racing phenom with far too many personal demons for a movie this thematically flimsy.

Chasing the ghost of his older brother, who died in a race, Speed goes pro. He discovers a world so full of confusing espionage and conspiracy that there were times I thought I was back in "Star Wars" trying to distinguish between the Galactic Republic and the Trade Federation. I'm surprised Speed didn't fall asleep behind the wheel.

This isn't to say the Wachowskis don't try to enliven every frame. When Roger Allam, as a vindictive corporate sponsor, drones on and on about the history of the racing league, the Wachowskis rotate his head across the screen while other images are projected in the background. Even though they use the technique repeatedly, it still doesn't distract from the laborious narrative.

Then there is the chimpanzee, the pet of Speed's younger brother (a thoroughly annoying movie tyke played by Paulie Litt). I realize the Wachowskis are simply being faithful to the original series while also catering to their PG-rated audience, but did they have to give the chimp this much screen time? I think we'd all be better off if there was a universal law limiting filmmakers to two monkey gags per movie.

As for the racing scenes, I appreciated them less as action sequences than as wild experiments in color. Everything blurs together in "Speed Racer," so that you rarely get a pure red, blue or white but instead a melted combination of the three - sort of like those Bomb Pops after they've been out in the sun.

"Speed Racer" left me feeling as if I'd also been out in the sun too long. The picture climaxes with a blended burst of color that is as overwhelming as the starburst at the end of "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Yet if that Stanley Kubrick classic was partly about how technology has been key to humanity's evolution, "Speed Racer" is an example of how technology can also be a dead end.

Read more by movie editor Josh Larsen at LarsenOnFilm.com.