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.
