Speed Racer

Premiere Glenn Kenny

This is not a film occurring in an alternate or imaginary reality; rather, it is a film of NO reality, that is, a picture that changes the rules of its universe strictly according to its creators' whims.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

At its best, it's buoyant pop entertainment focused on three things: speed, racing and retina-splitting oceans of digitally captured color.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

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.

Time Richard Corliss

Speed Racer announces the arrival of the virtual movie. If you watch the film overwhelmed by the assault of seductive visual information and wonder what you're seeing, here's the happy answer: the future of movies.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Aimed squarely at family audiences, the Wachowski Brothers' return behind the camera for the first time since the "Matrix" trilogy is a blur of video action painting and very loud sounds notable solely for its technical wizardry. In every other respect, it's pure cotton candy -- entirely non-nutritious but too sweet and pretty for young people to resist.

Newsweek David Ansen

Speed Racer creates a timeless, visually seductive world suspended somewhere between the pop '60s and the sci-fi future.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Filled with energy and visual pizzazz and at least strives for something more than dumb entertainment.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

This one is a kiddie show all the way, with characters as broad and one-dimensional as a billboard, a vision of good and evil as simple as a bumper sticker and a tiresome chimpanzee mugging through every other scene like something from a bad Tarzan movie.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Unlike a Pixar cartoon that embraces as wide an audience as possible, Speed Racer proudly denies entry into its ultra-bright world to all but gamers, fanboys and anime enthusiasts. Story and character are tossed aside to focus obsessively on PG-rated action and milk-guzzling heroes.

Empire Ian Nathan

It'll split the ranks like a pizza cutter: you might admire it as a Warholian blur of pop art, gawp and gasp at its Hot Wheels-for-real dynamism, or get a headache.

New York Daily News Joe Neumaier

The cast is generally game for playing cardboard cutouts, with Goodman having the most fun.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

There is one high note. You can approach Speed Racer as the trippiest stonerfest since Stanley Kubrick took his space odyssey.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

It's hard to say whether the Wachowski brothers' live action take on the Japanese Speed Racer cartoons is more irritating because it looks like a Hot Wheels video game or because the brothers seem to think that there's a powerful family drama humming away beneath the flashing lights and spinning wheels.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

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

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

It isn't going to set the world on fire, but it's perfectly acceptable for what it is.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

There's something here for everyone to dislike - the whole clan can have fun making fun of this thing.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

It's a family film done as a trip film. It is a trip, but it's a bad trip.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

The movie demands you be a glutton for sensation and then has the nerve to ask why you're not hungrier.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

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. And even they might feel an urge to squirm.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

At an exceedingly long 135 minutes, the film needs more than what might result from the explosion of a Crayola factory, and Speed Racer has nothing extra to offer - no heart, no excitement, no moments to cherish.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Borderline-experimental in the way it challenges the limits of perception. It's forward-thinking, visionary, and much of the time unwatchable.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

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.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

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

USA Today Claudia Puig

Yes, it's a candy-colored Day-Glo world, but there's a liveliness missing from this lead-footed Speed Racer.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

This movie sets out to honor and refresh a youthful enthusiasm from the past and winds up smothering the fun in self-conscious grandiosity.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Chances are, after they've passed the two-hour mark, viewers will share the same collective, if unspoken, wish: Go, Speed Racer. Go.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Gaudier than a Hindu-temple roof, louder than the Las Vegas night, Speed Racer is a cathedral of glitz.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

There's more story, heart, and – cutting to the chase, the quick, and the dead – pure, unadulterated fun contained within a scant five minutes of Rockstar Games' new Grand Theft Auto IV video game than there is in the whole of Speed Racer.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

The fakeness of it all overwhelms, dampening any real excitement. It's hard to care about characters so stiff and one-dimensional they out-cartoon the cartoon originals, and it's hard to watch them bop around like avatars in a flat, airless, digital world.

Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall

Andy and Larry Wachowski barrel through this adaptation of the 60s animated series, hoping perhaps that no one will notice the story is as flat as roadkill.

Slate Dana Stevens

The state of mind brought on by Speed Racer the movie is more akin to that phenomenon by which young infants, exposed to more stimuli than their systems are equipped to handle, will simply shut down.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Such a dull, clunky, joyless mess, it's hard to believe the people who made it understand much about movies.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Orgy, hell: The film is like a nightmare in which you're trapped in an arcade with screens on all sides and no eyelids. Based on an elemental but happily streamlined Japanese cartoon (an anime precursor), it's an eyesore, a shambles, with incoherent action and ear-buckling dialogue.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

Though the film is not as criminally poor as "V for Vendetta," which the Wachowskis wrote in 2005, it struck me as more insidious.

New York Post Kyle Smith

This adventurously awful film is awful in many ways at once.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

This isn't a picture filled with wonder and a sense of fun; it's so jaded and crass that I almost wonder if it's a highly unscientific experiment designed to gauge how little audiences will settle for these days. Manic and multicolored, Speed Racer is an excess of nothingness.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

This toxic admixture of computer-generated frenzy and live-action torpor succeeds in being, almost simultaneously, genuinely painful -- the esthetic equivalent of needles in eyeballs -- and weirdly benumbing, like eye candy laced with lidocaine.