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'Speed Racer'

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BY RAFER GUZMÁN | rafer.guzman@newsday.com

May 8, 2008

Somewhere between a Mario Bros. video game and Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Speed Racer" is one of the most visually audacious films to come along in years. With its supersaturated palette and slick surfaces, "Speed Racer" looks like a video-art installation at the Whitney, but it also wants to be an old-fashioned Hollywood family film. Against all odds it succeeds, making for a spectacular - and spectacularly strange - viewing experience.

Younger viewers probably won't remember the movie's source material, the Japanese cartoon series that debuted in America in 1967. The stiffly drawn characters are here made flesh: young Speed (Emile Hirsch, "Into the Wild"), Mom and Pops ( Susan Sarandon and John Goodman), little brother Spritle (Paulie Litt, a veritable mini-Goodman) and the family mascot, Chim-Chim (played by two chimpanzees, Willy and Kenzie). As Trixie, Speed's loyal girlfriend, Christina Ricci possesses the perfectly round head and saucer eyes of an anime cutie.

Writer-directors Andy and Larry Wachowski didn't so much "shoot" this film as generate it using green screens, 360-degree QuickTime photos and high-definition video. They've replaced the Gothic dystopia of their "Matrix" movies with a bright fun zone mostly free of danger: The drivers bounce to safety encased in giant foam orbs that put today's airbags to shame.

The plot concerns the evil racing mogul E.P. Arnold Royalton (Roger Allam, who handily steals his scenes), a renegade driver named Taejo (Korean pop singer Rain, making his U.S. film debut) and the masked, mysterious Racer X ( Matthew Fox), who may or may not be Speed's long-lost brother. But it's all an excuse for the Wachowskis to smash virtual cars together and indulge their wiggy aesthetic whims.

Through it all, the cast radiates real warmth; Goodman and Sarandon in particular may catch your emotions off-guard. For all its glossy modernity and pop-art freakiness, "Speed Racer" - which closed this year's TriBeCa Film Festival on Saturday - still has a human heart.

SPEED RACER (PG). The Wachowski brothers work their "Matrix" magic in this hyper-modern update of the old TV cartoon. 2:15 (fleeting language and potty humor). Previewing at some area theaters tonight at midnight. Opens wide tomorrow.