For roughly half an hour, Speed Racer is a genuine rush, pushing the envelop with its Crayola marker hues and willingness to bend our conventional ideas about what a movie should look like. Part live action, part cartoon, it’s a mishmash hybrid that delights in its own lack of grounding, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Wachowskis had tried to talk exhibitors into putting their theaters on gimbals while screening it. Unfortunately, the excitement of this lasts only so long, and after a while you begin to realize that everything the film has to offer has been frontloaded, leaving only increasingly diminishing results in which the physics-defying absurdity of each race begins to overwhelm any sense of actual emotional involvement. Thus, Speed Racer makes good on its promise to deliver something that hasn’t been seen before, but fails to make us want to see anything like it again. (Hollywood Jewel 16, Waco, TX)