No, Speed Racer, no!
I gave “Speed Racer” a second chance tonight, because it was playing at the drive-in, where every movie seems better.
In my new (albeit 15-year-old) car, I wouldn’t have minded the 150-mile round-trip drive to the Starlite, north of Potosi, if my wife and nephew had enjoyed the movie. But around the time that Spritle and Chim-Chim went bonkers on candy, Kathryn whispered to me, “This is the worst movie I’ve ever seen.” And 6-year-old Joey, who had begged me to take him, fell asleep before the halfway point.
You know a movie is bad when even the geeks turn against it. On IMDb, some smartypants posted a note about an apparent goof in the movie. The first time Speed is in a race, the one where he is close to breaking his dead brother’s record, the number on his car is 6. But the Mach 6 car doesn’t get built until the very end of the film. Thus this car at the beginning should have been the iconic Mach 5, which he drives in subsequent scenes. The geek and I could both be wrong, since the movie is incredibly hard to follow, but I surmise that this scene was originally supposed to take place later in the story, until the co-directors repurposed it. Since almost everything in the movie is a digital creation, it would have been easy for the Wachowskis to fix the number–if they had been paying as much attention to their story as to their color palette.
(For better or worse, in the Internet age, there are six billion fact checkers. On Friday, I mistakenly identified the Indiana Jones movie in which a cult worships the goddess Kali as “The Last Crusade.” Dozens of helpful readers were quick to point out that it was “The Temple of Doom.”–which I actually knew, because I had watched the movie a couple days earlier. Fortunately, on the Web you can correct a mistake without leaving a trace. Unless you’re dumb enough to blog about it afterward.)
Speed racer was good you moron.