Speed Racer

Speed Racer has moments of giggle-provoking as well as awe-inducing fun.

The film more then delivers on the level of pure excitement, offering the most visually arresting world ever conceived for a piece of mainstream entertainment.

Speed Racer may be the most extreme head-trip movie for kids since Gene Wilder conducted us to a lethal candyland in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory almost four decades ago.

File Speed Racer under "must-see" for the summer. The Wachowskis have again succeeded in giving filmgoers a unique experience.

Speed Racer bemoans corporately financed entertainment for the masses while serving as a fine example thereof. So as big, blaring blockbusters go, it's a bit of a hypocrite. It is also self-congratulatory.

In the same way that objects in the mirror are closer than they appear, Speed Racer makes a mockery of perception and perspective.

Speed Racer looks like a video-art installation at the Whitney, but it also wants to be an old-fashioned Hollywood family film. Against all odds it succeeds, making for a spectacular -- and spectacularly strange -- viewing experience.

Since it's based on a campy cartoon about a boy who continually saves the day by driving fast, it's tough to take Speed Racer too seriously. Everyone involved seems fully aware of that.

When it comes to eye candy and digital effects, this movie looks like cutting-edge cool. It's sensory overload for the eyes and ears, and it has all the rush and tingle of a roller coaster.

A sugar rush of pop art, op art and pure pop for car people, Speed Racer offers a crazy, turbo-charged mix of cartoon kitsch, gamer action, and a wild new way to think of -- and look at -- movies.

Speed Racer may not finish first in the summer blockbuster Grand Prix, but it gets style points for taking the scenic route at maximum velocity.

The bright, candy-colored universe the Wachowskis fashion out of digital and green screen wizardry is often psychedelic in the extreme.

Andy and Larry Wachowski, who wrote, directed and co-produced Speed Racer, have imaginations that run wilder than most.

Although it occasionally drags, Speed Racer is fun.

If Iron Man opened the summer movie season as fun brain food, then Speed Racer is the eye candy follow-up, a hi-octane visual wonder of almost unparalleled primary color delight.

There is no doubt that Speed Racer is aimed squarely at children and no one else, so it's curious that the villain's sinister plot revolves around, wait for it, insider trading.

Like the legendary Orson Welles, who rethought conventional storytelling and camera angles in Citizen Kane, Larry and Andy Wachowski are equally daring and innovative.

Made for kids and acidheads of all ages, the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer detonates a CGI explosion of trippy patterns and blurring colors.

Speed Racer is style, style, style without substance, but then it moves so fast that many may not care.

They call movies like this eye candy because they don't necessarily seek to nourish. Nevertheless, when they turn out looking like this, they can taste pretty good for empty calories.

The endless racing scenes have little visceral punch. As a summer thrill machine, Speed Racer is far from supercharged.

Speed Racer is the perfect movie for video-gaming kids -- but for others it may just cause migraines.

From the moment its kaleidoscopic opening credits begin, Speed Racer lets viewers know they're in for something different visually.

Speed Racer is brilliantly photographed and edited. It's told in a literally visionary style, full of innovation and breathtaking risk.

The racing sequences are almost unwatchable at times, like a flickering series of subliminal stimuli.

Has Christina Ricci ever looked cuter? As Racer's best gal, Trixie -- with heart-shaped face, sassy black bob and bubblegum-pink fashions -- Ricci is chic and spunky and completely underutilized.

It's a movie so bright you'll have to wear shades. That's a good thing because something needs to hide the laborious story line.

Speed Racer should please young boys (and some girls), but the rest of us will feel left in the dust.

Your inner child will be tickled fuchsia by this big-screen adaptation of Speed Racer -- especially if your inner child was an actual child in the era of blacklight posters in basement rec rooms.

Remember mixing Pop Rocks candy and Coca-Cola to make little volcanoes inside your head? Speed Racer is the movie equivalent.

The Wachowski Brothers dove into the Chocolate Factory for this hunk of live-action eye candy.

In the early going, the whiz-bang editing and searing primary colors in Speed Racer work like a sugar rush, but the crash from all that overstimulation is enough to reduce grown men into sobbing infants.

The Wachowski Brothers create a psychedelic candy store in Speed Racer, then get caught in it with their eyes popped, their brains blown and their pants down. It's a family film done as a trip film. It is a trip, but it's a bad trip.

There's something wild to see on almost every inch of the screen... Then the story had to intrude, and the caution flags went flying.

Young boys are the only suitable audience for Speed Racer, the elaborate live-action adaptation written and directed by Matrix creators Larry and Andy Wachowski.

Watching Speed Racer, the new summer lollapalooza from the Wachowski brothers, is like being force-fed a Costco-size bag of your favorite candy.

Why is a film aimed at kindergarteners so dense with indigestible plotting? That's just one of the many head-scratchers Speed Racer poses.

Speed Racer is so hyperfrenetic that, in the end, you wonder if the Wachowskis aren't trying to pull off an elaborate hoax -- a deranged techno fantasia posing as retro-ish family fare.

Sugar, not petrol, is the fuel that comes to mind watching candy-hued, visually hyperactive, narratively sputtering Speed Racer.

This live-action version of the once-popular cartoon series is pretty long for what's supposed to be a kids film.

It embraces an approach to cinema that shuns plainspoken clarity and structure for the jittery edits and splintered narrative devices of the video-gaming industry.

When the kid brother and a monkey are the most entertaining parts of Speed Racer, it's not a good sign.

As in The Matrix, the Wachowskis create a simulated reality with style and vision. But this time the machines win. Speed Racer feels untouched by human hands.

If this action extravaganza represents the future of movies, it's going to be a sad, dead and awful future.

If your child ate a large bowl of Skittles and a box of Crayolas, he might get the same colorful, nausea-inducing sugar buzz that comes from watching Speed Racer for more than two hours.

The actors seem lost in a gumball dispenser; the audience, for the most part, might well feel the same way.

It's like being immersed in a kaleidoscopic pop-art LSD nightmare in which one's bounced around a pinball machine and assailed by an onslaught of electric smoke tendrils.

Speed Racer is a hallucination with less meaning than usual, all perpetual motion and confectionery hues, with style to burn and a substance needle buried on "E."

It's kind of cool, but it's also more than a little like being trapped in a pinball machine while being asked to feel the Racer family's pain for the better part of two hours.

Adults who grew up on Speed Racer will be bored by what is essentially a corny animated kid's movie, and kids won't sit for two and a half hours of what is mostly people talking endlessly.

It seems the Wachowskis didn't put any effort into making Speed Racer a complete, entertaining movie, instead laboring to create something bright and shiny that has little concern for anything else.

What should have been a fast 90-minute spin around the track, Speed Racer runs for two hours and 15 minutes… but seems like seven hours.

Speed Racer is chaotic as a six-ring circus, gaudy as a transvestites convention and soullessly cute as a robot puppy.

Like the animated TV series that inspired this movie, you could look at it with the sound off and it wouldn't matter.

Speed Racer runs for a gluteus-deadening 2 hours and 9 minutes. Episodes of the ’60s anime TV series that inspired it ran for only 22 minutes. And that was too long

It may be a tricked-out ride, but Speed Racer is too long for kids to sit still and too frenetic for their parents. Maybe teens and twentysomethings will pick up the slack.

It's a giddy rush for a moment or two, but the comedown is long and harsh, and you'll need one helluva nap afterward.

The movie looks like nothing you’ve seen before, and it induces an instant hangover. You don’t need sunglasses to make it to the end -- you need two Valium.

This overlong, visually striking film barely leaves an impression after it's over: It's a shockingly empty piece of entertainment.

At one dramatic moment in Speed Racer, a chimpanzee throws his own feces in someone's face. It's an apt metaphor for the whole film.

Fans of the original show will consider it a travesty. Parents will check their watches and have about as much fun as they might while watching their kids play Xbox.

The presentation is so assaultive that it dulls any appreciation for the work that went into achieving it. Speed Racer wears you down to the nub.

Its attention span is measurable in microseconds, yet it runs more than two hours.