Speed Racer
Warner Bros. Pictures | Release Date: May 9, 2008 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
37
METASCORE
Generally unfavorable reviews based on 37 Critic Reviews
Positive:
8
Mixed:
14
Negative:
15
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
75
PremiereGlenn 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. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
At its best, it's buoyant pop entertainment focused on three things: speed, racing and retina-splitting oceans of digitally captured color. Read full review
75
Philadelphia InquirerSteven 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. Read full review
70
VarietyTodd 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. Read full review
70
TimeRichard 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. Read full review
70
NewsweekDavid Ansen
Speed Racer creates a timeless, visually seductive world suspended somewhere between the pop '60s and the sci-fi future. Read full review
67
Seattle Post-IntelligencerWilliam 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. Read full review
67
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
Filled with energy and visual pizzazz and at least strives for something more than dumb entertainment. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterKirk 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. Read full review
60
EmpireIan 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. Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsJoe Neumaier
The cast is generally game for playing cardboard cutouts, with Goodman having the most fun. Read full review
50
Entertainment WeeklyLisa 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. Read full review
50
ReelViewsJames 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. Read full review
50
The A.V. ClubScott Tobias
Borderline-experimental in the way it challenges the limits of perception. It's forward-thinking, visionary, and much of the time unwatchable. Read full review
50
TV Guide MagazineMaitland 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. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
If this action extravaganza represents the future of movies, it's going to be a sad, dead and awful future. Read full review
50
Film ThreatPete Vonder Haar
It isn't going to set the world on fire, but it's perfectly acceptable for what it is. Read full review
50
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. Read full review
50
Baltimore SunMichael Sragow
It's a family film done as a trip film. It is a trip, but it's a bad trip. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeTy Burr
The movie demands you be a glutton for sensation and then has the nerve to ask why you're not hungrier. Read full review
50
Rolling StonePeter Travers
There is one high note. You can approach Speed Racer as the trippiest stonerfest since Stanley Kubrick took his space odyssey. Read full review
42
Christian Science MonitorPeter 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. Read full review
38
Charlotte ObserverLawrence Toppman
Speed Racer is chaotic as a six-ring circus, gaudy as a transvestites convention and soullessly cute as a robot puppy. Read full review
38
USA TodayClaudia Puig
Yes, it's a candy-colored Day-Glo world, but there's a liveliness missing from this lead-footed Speed Racer. Read full review
30
Village VoiceJ. Hoberman
Gaudier than a Hindu-temple roof, louder than the Las Vegas night, Speed Racer is a cathedral of glitz. Read full review
30
Austin ChronicleMarc 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. Read full review
30
Washington PostAnn Hornaday
Chances are, after they've passed the two-hour mark, viewers will share the same collective, if unspoken, wish: Go, Speed Racer. Go. Read full review
30
The New York TimesA.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. Read full review
30
Chicago ReaderAndrea 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. Read full review
30
Los Angeles TimesCarina 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. Read full review
30
SlateDana 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. Read full review
25
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
Such a dull, clunky, joyless mess, it's hard to believe the people who made it understand much about movies. Read full review
20
New York Magazine (Vulture)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. Read full review
20
The New YorkerAnthony 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. Read full review
12
New York PostKyle Smith
This adventurously awful film is awful in many ways at once. Read full review
0
Wall Street JournalJoe 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. Read full review
0
SalonStephanie 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. Read full review
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