"Speed Racer": May cause bodily harm?

Thursday, May 8, 2008 | 12:56 PM

"Imagine someone pouring hot, melted Starburst candies into your corneas, and you just begin to approximate the experience of 'Speed Racer.'"
—Alonso Duralde at MSNBC

"Watching Speed Racer... is comparable to dousing one's eyeballs in a sugary hyper-digitized Skittles soup. It's like being immersed in a kaleidoscopic pop-art LSD nightmare in which one's bounced around a pinball machine and assailed by an onslaught of electric smoke tendrils."
—Nick Schager at Slant

"But what about the rest of us? True, our eyeballs will slowly, though never completely, recover, but what of our souls?"
—Anthony Lane at the New Yorker

"The Wachowski brothers...deliver enough cotton-candy-colored cinematic pyrotechnics to send you into sugar shock or strobe-induced seizures."
—Matt Stevens at E! Online

"Speed Racer spins some people's heads right near off their axis."
—David Poland at The Hot Blog

"[T]he Wachowski Brothers' follow-up to The Matrix trilogy is, if viewed from one angle, the most headache inducing kid's movie of them all; if viewed from another, it's the most expensive avant-garde film ever made."
—Glenn Kenny at Premiere

"[The] Speed Racer experience - I just can't bring myself to call this garish tantrum a "movie" - is akin to nothing so much as diving face first into a rainbow-hued bowl of methamphetamine-laced cinematic Jell-O. It's a giddy rush for a moment or two, but the comedown is long and harsh."
—Marc Savlov at Austin Chronicle

[Photo: "Speed Racer," Warner Bros., 2008]