Like a lot of nerds my age, Speed Racer was a steady part of my after-school diet. I'd come home and park in front of the TV and watch the adventures of the aptronymically-monikered Speed Racer and his red- and pink-garbed family. And it was a terrible, terrible cartoon. Primitively-animated and completely inane, and not to mention the weird, easily parodied tics, like the inevitable succession of "oh!"s or the rapid-fire run-on sentences. Speed Racer was fundamentally idiotic -- so of course I loved it. I loved the races and I loved the surreal plots with giant train-sized cars or a racing team that could make their cars form pyramids. I owned a replica Mach 5 -- either a Hot Wheel or Matchbox, I can't remember which -- and I spent I don't know how many hours on my bedroom floor, my cars lined up on an imaginary speedway, jockeying for position and crashing into each other spectacularly.

Honestly, I still want to do that sometimes.

The Wachowski brothers get that there's something very appealing to a kid about Speed Racer, which is probably why they've made this adaptation their first PG movie. The conundrum for them, though, was to find a way to appeal to 21st century youngsters, most of whom wouldn't know the Mach 5 from Maroon 5. (Do kids still listen to the Maroon 5?) So the movie is front-loaded with swervy, floaty cars, crazy camera tricks, slapsticky martial arts and bright, bright, really bright colors to keep those short attention spans from straying. The violence is toned down as well. In the cartoon, the unstated implication of a car plummeting off a cliff -- regardless of where the characters were, there were always cliffs and cars were constantly plummeting off them -- was that someone just died. (This really freaked my parents out at the time.) The movie ingeniously has its cake by encasing the doomed drivers in super rubber balls that bounce to safety, which fits in perfectly with the stupid-hilarious tone of the show.

And so for a while, it works. But then, once the first race finishes (and in one of many nods to video games, we see Speed racing against the ghostly image of his brother from ten years previous), the movie begins to stall. My showing was filled with about 80% kids (I think I was the only one that wasn't accompanying a minor) and you could feel their incomprehension begin to stifle their excitement. Why but why on Earth would anyone think that plot points about stock prices and corporate shenanigans would make for enthralling kids' entertainment? Because between all the cool racing and martial arts and monkey business, that's exactly what we get.

They couldn't help themselves, really. The Wachowskis have been hitting the same nail with the same hammer for six films now. (I'm counting V for Vendetta, which to me was about as much James McTeigue's as Poltergeist was Tobe Hooper's.) Each one is about a character who is trapped in an oppressive and claustrophobic world (whether it's a small-time mobster's apartment or an all-encompassing computer simulation) and, with the help of an experienced mentor (a lesbian plumber, a masked vigilante), finds a way to transcend his or her prison into freedom. Speed Racer is no different; Speed is trapped in a world controlled by five automotive companies who fix the sport that he loves and want him to conform. But Speed, as Mom Racer lets us know, is an artist and won't play the game. Instead, with the help of Racer X, he beats them all through sheer artistry and is rewarded with -- not so much the trophy (although that, too), but a vision of pure momentum. Speed becomes speed.

Clearly, this is a powerful theme for the brothers. However, both Bound and The Matrix were air-tight scripts -- plot and exposition became one with the moving image. For all the accolades they've received for their visual breakthroughs, it was their sense of story that carried the day. This died the moment The Architect opened his tedious mouth in The Matrix Reloaded. (Some will counter that it was the Club MTV Cave Dance Party -- wubba wubba wubba -- and I won't protest.) For whatever reason, the Wachowskis abandoned their natural story-telling talents in favor of stilted speechifying and lifeless philosophy, and while their filmmaking has remained limber, their writing hasn't yet recovered. The brothers' rage against this particular machine is heartfelt, but it's still trite.

There are other problems. It's a shame that the most faithful carryover from the cartoon is that Spritle and Chim-Chim bring everything to a screeching halt every time they appear, and while Emile Hirsch is a talented actor, his Speed is given nothing to do but glower. It barely feels like he's in the movie at times, and you certainly couldn't say that about Neo.

So why would the Wachowskis, two of the most powerful filmmakers in Hollywood, choose, of all things, a forty year old cartoon that carries little cultural weight? It wasn't until I left the theater that it occurred to me. There's a love story in Speed Racer, but it isn't between Speed and Trixie. It's between Speed and his brother, Racer X. Not a romantic love story, of course, but their relationship is the emotional life of the film. While Speed has the unconditional support of his Mom and Pops, what drives him is earning the respect of his brother. There's a bond there, of love, of fraternal competition, of mutual admiration between two men who are immensely talented and committed to fighting the power. It's the Wachowski brother story writ large. It brings a tear to my eye. It's also a $150 million dollar bro hug, which makes it amusingly subversive, horribly narcissistic and completely par for the course. Maybe, hopefully, one day they can break the cycle and simply make something good.

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