It’s with a little melange of obnoxious, “we told you so” crowing and smug schadenfreude that we’d like to tell you that we knew “Speed Racer” was going to shit the colorful bed come box-office time. And a new report from the Hollywood Reporter basically confirms as much.
We asked a few months ago, who the fuck would pay to see this eyeball scorching, epilepsy-inducing disaster? Who would the audience be exactly?? And we mocked the shit out of the initial trailer. It’s PG-13 and it looks like a “Rainbow Bright” episode on high grade mescaline (drop off 75% of the 25-35 audience who grew up with this thing and might have any bare traces of sentimental attachment to it at all) and it looks like such a vomit pinwheel of obnoxious day-glo colors and fey camp that it would probably scare off the under 13 crowd (which leaves the unemployed, the small, small percentage of 30 year old LSD fiends and the mildly curious/sadomasochistic – i.e. nobody). Clearly the directors – the Wachoski brothers, one sibling of undetermined sex and possibly ambiguous genitalia – have over-extended themselves.
So just as we thought, the film is apparently “tracking” extremely poorly (that’s the term for expected box-office projections). The film, which stars several thousand shades of magenta, is only expected to rake in a meager $25-$35 million, plus it’s supposed to come in second after “Iron Man.” Ruh, roh. Houston we have a problem. After all, the film cost over $100 million to make.
Does Speed Racer even have a hope at the #1 box-office spot?
“It’s too early to tell,” Warners domestic distribution president Dan Fellman said. “But this is the first real family movie of the summer, and we’re going to give it our best.”
Translation?: “We’re fucked. I’ve already updated my resume and sent it around West Hollywood.”
New York magazine’s David Edelstein hilariously calls it “a nightmare in which you’re trapped in an arcade with screens on all sides and no eyelids.” In fact, all the reviews are amusing. The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman, who is generally even-handed and staid, describes it as, “Gaudier than a Hindu-temple roof, louder than the Las Vegas night, Speed Racer is a cathedral of glitz.” Most comedic is the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane who basically says the film is lower than dirt. “Though the film is not as criminally poor as “V for Vendetta,” which the Wachowskis wrote in 2005, it struck me as more insidious.”
Ooof! Well, we told you so!
Oh and this quote spotted at Vulture is priceless. “In the cartoon, [Speed] talks really, really, really fast, and he says the same thing over and over. He’ll be like, ‘I wanna go on a race, because then I can win!’ And then he’ll say, ‘When I win, I’ll have won the race!’ We couldn’t do that for the movie.” — In answering this question, it dawns on Emile Hirsch that maybe starring in the already-originally-thin “Speed Racer” adaptation wasn’t the greatest idea on earth. [MTV]