Speed Racer

Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch) is the middle child of the Racer family; a petrolhead from birth, fitting spark plugs before he could talk, raised into a legacy of drivers. Will he be able to step out of the shadow of his maligned older brother Rex Racer and win the Grand Prix for the family team or will he be lured into the evil clutches of the Royalton Corporation, compromising his morals for money, and losing himself? Will he taste the Cold Milk Of Victory or be mired in the filthy oil of defeat? Can you guess?

Speed Racer's plot is the usual identikit mulch of summer blockbusters gummed together with so much saccharine pap and bland bolt-on comedy that audiences will be gagging in the aisles. The plot has about as much importance as it did in the original television series; if you can just allow it to wash around you, and try to focus on the high-octane visuals and the stylised cinematography - which are pretty impressive - you might be able to enjoy this.

Once more the Wachowski brothers have succeeded in making something that is extremely slick - you can't fault the special effect production, this is serious fan-boy masturbation material - but more discerning viewers (i.e. anyone over the age of 12) will have a niggling feeling that it has all the depth of a Honda advert. All the explosions, flips and barrel rolls in the world can't really gloss over the surfeit of good, wholesome, American values that are crammed in at every opportunity - even the most sugar-fuelled, ADHD addled children will find this one tough to swallow.

Emile Hirsch, Susan Sarandon, John Goodman and Christina Ricci try to make the best of clunky dialogue - and there are lots of entertaining cameos from notable actors such as Richard Rowntree, but Roger Allam's hammy turn as the evil Royalton and Paulie Litt's grating preteen comic hijinks are painful to watch. Videogame fans may detect homage to a wide range of racing game titles - the tracks look like they were lifted from F-Zero or Wipeout and the cars look like they belong in MarioKart or Outrun, slithering across the tracks in an eternal powerslide.

At times the neon-tinged speedfreak race sequences are CGI-sublime, utterly divorced from realism, a loving reinterpretation of the garish original anime series; but they can't hide a litany of tedious cliches - the academically challenged hero, the childhood sweetheart, the comic sidekicks, the caring parents, the tragic backstory, the evil corporation, the cockney henchmen, etc. Speed Racer feels like it's little more than a cynical cash in - a side promotion of a almost certainly dire videogame tie-in and a reason to sell a couple of million lunchboxes.