Just a drag ‘Racer’

It’s hard to imagine a movie better suited to the aesthetic tastes of an addled 8-year-old boy than “Speed Racer,” or one worse suited to his attention span. Unless, of course, he enjoys speechifying. For a movie about speed and forward momentum, “Speed Racer” provides very little of either, though it does explode into spurts of frenetic, confusing and hard-to-follow action -- and that’s just on the racetracks.

Emile Hirsch (“Into the Wild”) plays the iconic Speed Racer, a Grand Prix driver determined to avenge his dead brother’s tarnished legacy and clean up the sport of racing in a futuristic world that looks like the digitally rendered inside of a pinball machine. And vast swaths of dialogue take the place of blocks of dramatic action in which things happen, once called scenes.

Sometimes the talking goes on for so long that the filmmakers find it necessary for characters’ heads to detach and start floating across the frenzied neon background, probably as a guard against atrophy or arterial thrombosis. In one notable instance, Hirsch’s Speed Racer declines a sponsorship offer from the corrupt Royalton Industries with a wordy homily to family values, only to have Royalton, played by Roger Allam, respond with, “Now let me give you a little history lesson,” followed by a sharp intake of breath. It’s like C-SPAN set in an arcade.

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Styles of futures past

The Wachowski siblings, who wrote and directed the movie, adapted “Speed Racer” from the hit 1960s anime series about a race car driver from a race-car-driving family, but the movie completely lacks its style and melodramatic flair. Instead, it feels more like an amalgam of “Spy Kids” and the Wachowski-directed “Matrix” trilogy -- juvenile and hermetic.

In an attempt to replicate the future-retro look of the ‘60s with live-action characters, they’ve decked out the Racer family -- Pops (John Goodman), Mom (Susan Sarandon), big brother Rex (Scott Porter), middle brother Speed (Nicholas Elia and later Hirsch), baby brother Spritle (Paulie Litt) and hanger-on girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci) -- in pop-kitsch wardrobes straight out of “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” (all but Goodman, that is, who is the spitting image of a Super Mario Brother).

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No curves in the plot

As stimulating as all of this might be for the cornea, it doesn’t make up for the two-hour-and-15-minute slog you have to wade through for the pleasure of watching a few measly races. Though they make up the best, most exciting parts of the movie (the dramatic parts require little more of the actors than delivering their lines), they’re not much, really, in the way of action sequences.

The computer-generated backgrounds are fanciful and whimsical -- bizarre blends of far-flung exotic locations and sealed circuitry -- but it’s difficult to follow what’s going on with the cars.

Worse, long stretches of the movie are devoted to the advancement of a plot so perfunctory and boring -- it’s a rehashed version of the battle between the little people and the evil corporation in which, of course, the little people prevail -- it could have been elimated entirely at no noticeable loss to the film. (Why do we keep paying conglomerates to supply us with this particular fantasy, anyway? Wouldn’t it be more economical just to say, “You win”? Something to think about in these recessionary times.)

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Big, bad billionaire

The movie begins with the background on Speed Racer’s devotion to the sport, cutting back and forth between the past and the present in a way that’s sure to confuse all but the most sophisticated second-graders.

Speed’s idolized older brother Rex has a run-in with a sponsor, falls out with Pops, wrecks his car (called the Mach 1) and disappears from the Racers’ lives forever. Years later, Speed, now at the wheel of the famed Mach 5, follows in his brother’s footsteps and soon finds himself being courted by the smarmy billionaire Royalton, who can scarcely avoid licking his chops whenever Speed enters his sights.

Pops, patriarch of the mom-and-pop operation Speed Motors, is, of course, suspicious. “This kind of company scares me,” he says to Royalton when he shows up for breakfast one day. (Pancakes made by Mom, naturally, who does little else but coo supportively.) “People like you have too much money; it makes you think the rules don’t apply to you.”

Can one idealistic driver, his chipper girlfriend, his loving, supportive parents and the comic-relief duo of little brother and pet chimp take on a bazillion-dollar industry? Sure, with the help of his family, a mystery racer known as Racer X (Matthew Fox) and a rival megacorporation whose heir apparent (played by Korean pop star Rain) is well-positioned to win.

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Accelerates too late

Some momentum is gained toward the end, when Speed decides to enter the perilous race -- the Casa Cristo 5000 -- that supposedly killed his brother. A kung fu sequence in a CGI snowfall, in which the “Matrix bullet time effect” is modified and updated to become “Racer time” (“bullet time” with more anime-appropriate separate planes of depth), as well as a couple of well-choreographed “car fu” sequences feel like the fulfillment of something long-ago promised and forgotten.

But 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.

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carina.chocano@latimes.com

“Speed Racer.” MPAA rating: PG for sequences of action, some violence, language and brief smoking. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes. In wide release.