TheRetroCritic

Ryo to the rescue!

Racing forklifts because that's a thing people do.

Here's what is quite probably the most expensive live-action anime film adaptation ever made making it basically Hollywood's biggest risk financially dipping its toe in that genre. Similarly to how the Astro Boy CGI feature lost about 20 million at the box-office, Speed Racer did make money but was ultimately a flop, losing over 25 million. But that doesn't mean anything quality-wise, after all, Blade Runner , The Thing and The Night Of The Hunter were all flops in their day. Speed Racer, however, is no Blade Runner. Right off the bat, you are thrown into a multicoloured CGI world so visually rainbowed that you'd think it was yet another Dr Seuss fairy tale come to life in movie form. The thing basically looks like an even more stylised The Cat In The Hat , with less talking cats and more bouncing cars. Directed by the Wachowski broth-... siblings, of The Matrix trilogy fame, Speed Racer takes a very old anime series and makes it into a full-blown candy-colou

Remaking genius cult B-movie Death Race 2000 was either going to end up being a very bad idea or a very good idea. The film (think Wacky Races with gore, Sylvester Stallone and boobs) said pretty much all it had to say it seemed. But here we are with a Jason Statham B-side actioner that's... Neither bad or good, really. More the latter than the former, though. The film opens with a cool car chase involving masked driver Frankenstein (played by David Carradine in the original film and rocking a cameo here), a really good start: the cars look great, the action's fine... That is, until the character is killed off! Yeah, then it becomes a prison movie for some reason with Jason Statham getting locked up after being wrongfully accused of killing his own wife. It's like Steven Seagal came in and rewrote the movie! It's not bad but it's not quite what you expect walking in, frankly. Thankfully, though, things finally get down to business and the movie gets bac