At a time when the environmentally and economically suicidal consequences of America’s obsession with automobiles are becoming clear even to the most stubborn freemarketers, with the cost of gasoline on a seemingly unstoppable rise and the near-inevitability of millions of more cars on the roads of India and China promising to make the situation much, much worse—just as it seems that Americans are finally starting to get it through their collective heads that civilization cannot continue on this way—is this really the time for a blockbuster movie that glorifies cars? All right, I hear you saying, “Relax, it’s only a dumb kids’ movie, just a fantasy.” Granted. But an escapist fantasy should at the very least put such real-life concerns out of your head for a few hours, and the best way I can think of to convey to you the mind-numbing experience of watching Speed Racer is to tell you that its astonishing shallowness can’t help but make you think about reality. Based on a crappy cartoon show that was produced in Japan and imported to the US in the late 1960s, the movie was written and directed by Andy and Larry (soon to be Lana, so the rumor goes) Wachowski. From the makers of The Matrix you would expect something to engage the mind or at least surprise the eye. But all I saw in the hour of this I was able to sit still for was the result of two fanboys with an unlimited budget getting to indulge themselves in a childhood fixation. The movie puts live actors into computer-composed settings, or at least computer-modified ones, which some viewers might find interesting, though it doesn’t seem to be anything you couldn’t find in an average video game. At least the Fast and the Furious films had real cars—where’s the thrill in watching animated cars race around tracks that look like they’re made of glass, slipping and sliding in ways that in no way resembles the actual experience of rubber on asphalt? Worst of all is the story, which is as simpleminded as anything on an episode of the TV cartoon (though it runs four times as long). The only audiences who could possibly warm to this are kids whose parents won’t let them get Grand Theft Auto 4.

—m. faust