This thing is tanking on RT, with 38% rating.
Now the question is, take a risk friday or wait for some more reviews?
Critically and commercially, this will be the turd of the summer. Calling it now.
It just looks too much like a game. All I can see is F-Zero/Wipeout when looking at it. Might be popular with kids though, dunno.
The trailers, with their complete lack of any sort of characterization, acting, or plot, scream “terribad”.
Well, it is a movie based on a very stupid kids cartoon. You shouldn’t expect too much.
I could do without the E-Surance tie-in ad campaign.
Think its going to get hurt by Iron. Anyways I wonder about the bad review, "Speed Racer proudly denies entry into its ultra-bright world to all but gamers, fanboys and anime enthusiasts. "
Oh no, a movie that doesn’t pander to everyone!!!
I have a feeling that Iron Man is going to hold #1 this weekend.
John Goodman was making the rounds on the talk shows and they were showing a trailer where he fights a ninja. It was total camp slapstick with all the cornball musical cues and sound FX – I felt like I was watching something that had escaped from the Super Mario Bros movie. It was THAT bad.
The extended car chase from Matrix Reloaded is one of my favorite action movie scenes of the past decade, so the Wachowskis doing an entire movie on car racing would seem to be an easy sell. But so far, it looks too CGI for me, too fake, too cartoony. It looks like a TRON sequel that they forgot to set inside a computer.
I got the following in an email from a buddy, who shall remain nameless so as not to implicate his source:
A dude I know worked on Speed Racer; when I asked him how it looked, he said, “Like a tranny threw up.”
-Tom
Looks like I’ll be missing this one. Indiana Jones has my money.
It’s a fierce hot tranny mess.
Wow, I just figured out what these trailers remind me of…Dick Tracy.
Hm, there was a guy on RPG.net who went to an advance screening and had good things to say about it. His biggest problem with the film is that the actors seemed to be taking their roles a little too seriously for how inherently silly the film is.
How the Wachowskis have fallen
I’ve not seen it, but I’m confident it’ll hardly be the worst thing they’ve been involved with.
This Rolling Stone article did them no favors whatsoever.
Gah, I almost managed to forget that stupid movie.
Actually it reminds me of a couple of old game memories, both experienced at the same location. Way way back, apaprently before game machine CPUs could handle colors, some arcades would paste a diffraction grating over the screen for a rainbow effect, so stuff at the top was purple, and stuff at the bottom was red. Like wow, man, colors! I remember there was this coin arcade on 52nd street and Broadway that used to do that to games like Galaga and Asteroids.
A couple of years after that, at a time when most games were still crude beeping sprite-based things, with a few vector holdouts, a racing game came out that I was hugely impressed with. I don’t remember the name, publisher or any other such helpful details, but it was some kind of spacy future racing kind of deal, with highly detailed (for the time) raster backgrounds that were ten times better than anything else in the arcade. Sadly the gameplay sucked, and they insisted on charging $.50 a game for it, but the graphics were good enough that was still kind of cool…
… and the long winded point of all that is that game reminds me a hell of a lot of the weird future city scenes in the Speed Racer trailer. Lots and lots of colors in some implausible scifi setting.
I saw Speed Racer this week at pre-screening set-up for my work because my we are one of the major licensees.
Mild Spoilers
Bad:
- Too Long (by about 10 mins)
- Stock market convolutions of story rival “Trading Places” for the incoherance medal.
- Probably necessary to see on a big screen to get the full impact. Sort of like those CDs that need to be played LOUD to really rock.
Good:
- Characters fleshed-out as much as needed, and in some cases, more than expected.
- A few laugh-out loud moments
- I certainly does recall “Tron” in places…in a good way.
- Race tracks and racing action are in the “never ever ,ever seen that type of action on-screen before” category
- Full story arc with no obvious need for a sequel (but the hooks are in-place)
- Nothing too objectionable for the kids
- Trixie. Sue me, I was entranced.
- Holy crap, if I was 8 this would be “greatest movie ever made” … for this week anyway.
I saw it today, on a whim. And… maybe I shouldn’t have, but I liked it.
Speed Racer is a silly, drawn out, 2-hour-plus artificially-flavoured candy-coated video game of a movie. Gosh, is it fun. The actors treat the story seriously enough that you root for the characters, but not so seriously that they forget to have fun – you get the sense of a real, growing family (albeit not a terribly complex one). The racing scenes are chaotic and hyperkinetic, yet it’s always clear where everyone is and what’s at stake. The climactic race has real emotional payoffs about giving (and getting) support from your parents and siblings. Yes, I said it. Emotional payoffs.
On the other hand, I can totally get the naysayers too. The movie’s too long, though not by as much as people claim. Susan Sarandon’s talents are wasted. Scenes with the annoying little brother and the chimp are as teeth-grittingly awful as you’d expect. The colour design and CG “sets” work on the racetrack, but look fake and distracting in suburbia. The stylistic gags get repetitive about 90 minutes in. If you hate this movie, you’re not wrong.
On the other-other hand, Trixie. If you need me, I’ll be in my bunk.
Early box office numbers look pretty weak. $5.8m for Friday, compared to $15m+ for Iron Man and compared to $35m+ for Iron Man on it’s first Friday. Don’t be surprised if the weekend total is under $20m, which is well below what was expected/hoped.