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Speed Racer

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Speed Racer (2008)

May. 09,2008
|
6.1
|
PG
| Adventure Action Comedy Family
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Speed Racer is a young and brilliant racing driver. When corruption in the racing leagues costs his brother his life, Speed must team up with the police and the mysterious Racer X to bring an end to the corruption and criminal activities.

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Reviews

Tedfoldol
2008/05/09

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

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Console
2008/05/10

best movie i've ever seen.

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Limerculer
2008/05/11

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

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Winifred
2008/05/12

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

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ryderspearmann
2008/05/13

Speed Racer is a stunning achievement.Only those that know the original Speed Racer can really comprehend the difficulty of the task the Wachowskis took on. Their decision, clearly, was to being Speed Racer to the screen in a pure adaption... not a re-imagining. The artistic choices they needed to make to pull this off are inspired.The speeds are insane, the driving is nuts, the tracks are crazy and impossible!But that IS Speed Racer.Nine-year-olds "got" Speed Racer in 1968... they followed it perfectly in a way that only a blindingly fast nine-year-old sponge of a brain can. To the average boy, it is riveting. Nine-year-olds today will also "get" Speed Racer.True to the sounds, sights, characters and plots of the original, the 2008 Speed Racer hits it's target with LASER precision. It is bold in it's execution, being so true to the original that even the questionable elements of the 1968 version are retained, including the bizarre transitions and overall campy feeling.The film is woven tightly, providing the entire backstory and introducing all of the primary characters with considerable depth DURING the first race which serves as the opening to the film. By the end of this first race, we understand Speed perfectly. We know who he is and what drives him... and again, he is the Speed from 40 years ago. The other characters are true as well.Everything from emotions to camera angles are meticulously chosen to match the original. This is well demonstrated when Rex Racer talks over his shoulder, his back toward his father as he leaves forever in the tradition of the Japanese original. The tension and drama are constructed using the original techniques throughout.Speed Racer is the PERFECT live action rendition of anime... which to the uninitiated will seem bizarre and out of place. The Wachowskis have given new generations of kids a true gift... putting a beloved story on the big screen that might have otherwise been lost, and doing so in a painstakingly pure effort which will thrill little kids for many years to come.

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cinemajesty
2008/05/14

Based on the short-lived Japanese animated TV-Series by Tatsuo Yoshida from 1967, the Wachowski siblings took on to an live-action adaptation to be produced in 2007 at Studio Babelsberg after their mixed reviewed finale of "The Matrix Revolutions" (2003). "Speed Racer" (2008) stays away from on locations car stunt work, instead utilizing Green-Screen crafted sound stages with digital and high-speed camera work to bring their interpretation of the Japanese original to the scree. Giving a suitable budget of approximately 120 Millions U.S. Dollars under supervision of long-term collaborating producer Joel Silver, the Wachowskis present a clear vision on a previous published material by staying true to all initially involved characters and car designs.To international audiences and the majority of anticipating fans of the original series, the release to event movie season 2008 starting in May 2008 had been a disappointment. Competing with movies as "Iron Man" (2008) or "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" (2008), "Speed Racer" could not convince its PG-family target group to be a technically well-executed Retro-Science-Fiction movie. The story-line had been simplified down to the core of having main character, portrayed by a match-cast actor Emile Hirsch, find recognition in an high compatible industrial racing world market, always faithfully supported by his all too sweet family members.This drained sweetness, tasting like an lollipop on ecstasy, may be the cause for a missed opportunity to move away from the artificiality of a digital extension image system throughout the picture, missing one or two sequences in an on-location environment, where the audience would have found release from an close-to epileptic over-kill in color corrections and editorial pacing by a running time of over 120 minutes. It is understandable that producing "Speed Racer" had been an initial risk management for producers Joel Silver and Grant Hill, leaving the Wachowski Director-Duo full creative freedom to realize their directorial vision, which clearly had been due to long-enduring love with the Original Japanese TV series.Nevertheless an adaptation of a source material needs further visual twists to stand apart from the Original, sharing an individual filtered vision of the source material, which makes the spectator feel that he has not been cheated on a box office ticket. A glimpse of this approach had been flashed by with the character of Racer X, played by actor Matthew Fox, in the last ten minutes of "Speed Racer" with an haunted revelation of the character of Speed's vanished brother still being alive in a brilliantly edited flashback. Unfortunately, this mind-blowing story twist comes at a point in the picture, where the audience so-to-speak had already been finished with their subconsciously evaluation of a movie event, which missed its chance to create attracting word-of-mouth with leaving specter's at the movie houses.© 2017 Felix Alexander Dausend (for Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC)

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adamholsinger
2008/05/15

This movie has it's flaws. I loved Speed Racer when I was little and our entire family saw it in theaters. I was still a kid and I loved it. It still does hold up well even though it has hiccups. Some of the editing and acting is flat, the backgrounds get uncomfortably bright, and the transitions are awkward. But, I have not seen any movie like it. I enjoy the racing scenes, and the action is pretty nice. Spritle and Chim-Chim are entertaining comic reliefs. The movie is light hearten. But, the camera work is not the best. The effects are hit and miss. It is going for it's own style, and it does work most of the time. One thing is for sure, this is my favorite trip movie.

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Mr-Fusion
2008/05/16

It may have died a commercial death, but "Speed Racer" is a thoroughly entertaining movie, and it was a highlight in a very rocky Summer movie season. This movie does a bang-up job with the racing scenes, which are invigorating, but it also keeps things moving during the quieter scenes (thanks mostly to its inventive visual style and family-centric story). I don't normally get into the rapid-fire insert shots of clutch-and-shift (I'm looking at you Fast and Furious movies), but it fits in with the rhythm of the scenes. Or it may be because this is a live-action cartoon. But either way, the action in this movie works.This is a great family movie with a winning cast (damn can Christina Ricci pull off that anime wig), candy-colored palette and supercharged driving. The races are nail-biting and have you cheering in all the right places. The good guys win, the bad guys get theirs and it's a lot of fun.8/10

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