Well this year seems only to get harder and harder for me to watch. I had semi-high hopes for this, coming as it does from the Wachowskis, being as it is not The Matrix (great movies, all: but I’m dying for a return to Bound), starring as it does Christina Ricci (with a pink helicopter to boot, lol) – and it sure looked colourful.

It starts well – I’d say my attention was full for at least 20 minutes, there’s some really good storytelling setting up the backstory; I laughed, I was gripped. It felt like maybe it was gonna come from the same school of car love as Chitty and Herbie, which bode well for my liking it. The younger brother character is surprisingly one of the better things in the movie where you’d actually imagine him to be annoying as hell – he reminded me of Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon combined with Short Round from Temple of Doom or something.

But somewhere in the middle, I just stopped caring. Then, as time wore on, I realised what was really annoying me. It’s a Robert Rodriguez movie. We saw this – or at least, we had the opportunity to see this, 5 years ago in Spy Kids 3. The colours, the car racing, the goofy comedy, the heightened emotion, the corny values – trust me, it was all there in that movie, yet people turned a blind eye to it waiting instead till the sick Sin City to be hip in their sudden adulation for the film maker who was by then, as far as I’m concerned, already on a downward turn from which he hasn’t yet, and mayn’t yet, recover. And now a lot of people seem to be giving the same cheesy thing a free ride just because it’s the Wachowskis. I’m sorry, but this is as bad a movie as I finally realised Spy Kids 3 was (outside of Courtney Jines) – but it least Rodriguez did it first, not to mention cheaper.

Then there’s the message of the movie. It comes over all grandiose like James Earl Jones’ speeches in Field of Dreams … “It doesn’t matter if racing never changes. What matters is if we let racing change us.” Again, I’m sorry, but this came over to me a lot like, we can’t do anything to change the state of the world and the fact that it’s going to hell – all we can do is hope it doesn’t take us down with it. And if we apply it back to the Wachowskis and the filmmaking world, if this movie isn’t proof that they’ve let the shoddy changing state of cinema change them, then I dread what they’re (or rather, Joel Silver, who seems to have brainwashed them somewhere between Reloaded and Revolutions) gonna come up with next. I found it an even more depressing message to find in a movie for kids than Enchanted‘s, “don’t bother dreaming.” (Yeh, I guess that’s probably ‘just me, then?’ too.)

The problem is: sh*t is going to take you down with it if you make yourself a part of it and don’t bother to make an effort to change it. If Speed really wanted to just race for the love of racing, then why was he in the big corporate races to start with? Why, as another review I just read pointed out, does he not even looking like he’s enjoying himself anyway lol? And if the Wachowskis really wanted to follow their own lead and make movies just for the fun of it, then why wasn’t this movie made with Legos on YouTube?

It just left me sad.

Tags: action, cars, comics

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 8:52 pm and is filed under 2 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.