OK, here’s my review. Three stars (out of five). It’s not that Speed Racer is an unwatchable movie—it’s just that the neon eye candy feels like it’s taken directly from the Star Wars prequels. The greenscreen vistas look very similar to Coruscant’s cityscapes and the pod race on the desert planet Tatooine, only with no depth of field and more two-dimensional. You wouldn’t be surprised to see Jar Jar Binks hanging out with Chim-Chim here. The race cars glide and shuffle around a videogame racetrack in a reality without any friction or mass, it seems. But if you can accept this  bubblegum technocolor world on its own terms, there is some good story telling here: we have an intriguing plot that expands on the original anime’s backstory of Racer X (the filmmakers wisely decided to make his body suit all-black instead of white with a big red “M” across his chest, as in the original cartoon—duh, kind of looks like the hood of the Mach 5, doesn’t it?—not a good way to hide your secret identity as the presumed-dead elder brother of the Racer clan). And, for those who aren’t in the know, that “M” stands for “Mifune,” the original Japanese surname of Pops Racer, founder of Mifune Motors.

Rather than opting for the obvious mindless rollercoaster summer entertainment, the Wachowski brothers have added a simple yet compelling message: keep driving for your dreams. OK, not exactly original. So what? Our young hero is faced with the dilemma of giving up the rights to a small-company to a corporate goliath. Which will he choose? Guaranteed riches under the automobile world’s evil empire or keeping the family-owned business intact and enjoying Mom Racer’s pancakes until he finally gets hitched to his comely girlfriend Trixie?  How did an after-school cartoon get this political and deep?

Well, in case you couldn’t guess, Speed doesn’t choose the former. But first he has to show off his kung fu skills on some lame ninjas with Pops (John Goodman as Pops makes a pun in Japanese that had the audience chuckling) doing his de rigeur helicopter spin toss. But why is Speed’s fixer-upper buddy Sparky speaking with an Australian accent? Why couldn’t they have picked a cuter kid for Spritle? The real monkey who plays Chim-Chim can act pretty well and delivers his reactions right on cue. Rex Racer has the right body build and tone of voice; Matthew Fox nails it and clearly knows the original cartoon series from the early 70s. Susan Sarandon tries to make Mom Racer into more than a cardboard cut-out character, but is there any reason to? How can you not cringe when she says to Speed, “I’m just so proud to be your Mom”?

In the end, of course, Speed wins the big race, which comes a little too late in the film, on the heels of the previous one. With his aggressive driving he proves, as the song goes, that he’s a demon on wheels. The well-known theme music rises to glorious symphonic heights. Speed Racer has finally been done in live action (of a sort), and actually it has been done quite well. It could have been a lot worse. I’ll probably get the DVD for repeated viewings.