Speed Racer is a visual masterpiece with stunning photo-real backdrops and car chases. The story is not groundbreaking but does justice to the source material (the anime show by the same name) and is told in a non-linear format. The characters and action are fun to watch and are what you would expect from a family film. The stand out sections of the film are the car chases and they do not disappoint. The action is carefully planned out and executed which is what you would expect from the makers of ‘The Matrix’.

What a lot of people don't get is that Speed Racer is meant to be cheesy and this is where a lot of the criticism comes from. Speed Racer will not appeal to everyone as it is cheesy and the colours have been known to give seizures but if you're willing to go along for the ride then you're sure to have a blast!

Speed Racer is the live-action film of the Japanese cartoon that ran on Saturday mornings back in the 1960's. You may have heard about it from film critics, who almost universally crucified the film with poor, patronizing, and sometimes even downright insulting reviews.

It's all nonsense. There is one way to describe this film in one single word:

BEAUTIFUL.

Saying that the critics completely missed the point of the adaptation of a Saturday morning cheesy cartoon would be a gross understatement. They missed something more vital. They merely miss the joy of cinema, the childish enjoyment of a film that is made purely to be as much fun as it could possibly be. The reviews that panned it were only the result of the stirring they felt in the deep parts of their hardened, blackened hearts, which no longer know why they liked cinema in the first place; the yearning of the poor souls who no longer feel any joy in their existence, lashing out in fear of facing their own emptiness with a thinly disguised pretense of fastidious pomposity and vaporous sophistication that can not stop the tears when they cried themselves to sleep after opening night.

This film is made of pure, unadulterated FUN. To borrow a phrase from the TvTropes page about this film, it runs of high-octane Rule of Cool. It makes no apologies for anything the original cartoon did, but embraces it and cranks it up to 11, going farther beyond the impossible than most Saturday morning cartoons ever did – and it is a LIVE ACTION film, let that sink in for a minute or two-, throws any pretense of realistic physics or anything other than technobable to give us the most awesome, over the top racing scenes in cinema history, and every actor, the entire freaking cast, lets their inner ham run wild with memorable, hammy line deliveries one after another.

If you ever needed an example that would perfectly show why movie critics just can't be trusted to find a fun film stuck up their backsides using both hands, a map, and a compass, this would be it. This film is incredible. My only regret is having listened to those critics instead of having watched it in the biggest, loudest cinema I could find, with a bucket of popcorn and tickets for three consecutive showings.

I guess I'm showing my age, but when I saw the shorts for this, my mind immediately did a flash-back to the old Wipeout game I used to play on my PC back in the '90's. Then I watched the movie. Did my mind change? Nope, I still thought of Wipeout, but with a mix of other games in there, as well as the obvious inclusion of a storyline. Loved the game, loved the movie, and the acting was pretty decent too. And I ask – is Christina Ricci actually getting any older? Nice. The one thing I have to complain about is the fact this movie did make my mind go back to the old Speed Racer cartoon, which I admit was ultimately cheesy, but great none-the-less. For this I have to only give the movie a 4/5