I'd be a consummate liar and hypocrite if I said that I was not at all entertained by the Speed Racer feature film when I watched it on DVD a few days ago; it was funny at some parts and exciting at others, and I honestly liked the story which propounded the arguably speculative but at the same time intriguing conspiracy theory that race victories are often decided in board rooms rather than on racetracks. Sure, I found a lot, and I mean a lot, wrong with it, but I still managed to enjoy myself for most of its 130 minutes.
That said, I understand why it bombed, primarily because it's a phenomenon I've seen before.
The first movie that comes to mind when I think of movies that tried to reach several audiences all at once is Titan A.E., the last feature-length animated film ever to be directed by one of my favorite animation wizards of the pre-Pixar era, Don Bluth, the director of An American Tail and The Secret of N.I.M.H. It was way too violent to be a kid's film (with several characters getting blown away and with one character snapping the neck of another) but never, even with Joss Whedon as one of its screenwriters and some really fantastic CGI blended in with the hand-drawn animation, quite seemed to cross over into sci-fi action territory. I, for one, liked it, but kind of had an inkling that its somewhat amorphous nature could, as it did, hurt its potential box-office. The real tragedy was how this movie apparently did for Don Bluth what Gigli did for one-time Oscar-nominated director Martin Brest. It's sad that this approach to animated filmmaking tanked because had it worked I could see a lot of comic books being made into films this way, and to my mind it is definitely nice to watch. Two attempts by Disney to make movies in this style, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet, suffered similar fates at the box office, with Treasure Planet being one of the biggest box-0ffice turkeys of 2002. A Punisher film done in this anime hybrid style, reminiscent of the short-lived but fantastic HBO Spawn series, would probably have been a lot better than all of the forgettable live action films Marvel has failed to sell.
Another example I can think of, though this is slightly different, is Kingdom of Heaven, a movie that tried to be a historical epic in the vein of Braveheart and a political commentary on the struggle in Israel all at once, with director Ridley Scott and screenwriter William Monahan trying perhaps a little too hard not to antagonize any Muslim viewers. The film, while gorgeously shot and with a number of good points, ultimately meandered and sputtered at the box office as well, although a director's cut that has been released on DVD which had something like an additional half-hour of footage was allegedly a much better film than what made it into theaters.
Like both these films, Speed Racer is, in many ways, a fairly bold enterprise. While I wasn't a fan of the Japanese animated TV show on which the movie was based, I liked the idea of a major, big-budget racing movie, the first to be attempted since Renny Harlin's trainwreck titled Driven. I even liked that, from what I saw in the trailers, this movie, rather than try (and fail) to capture racing the way that Harlin did, the Wachowski brothers of Matrix fame/infamy were trying for a retro-futuristic, hyper reality.
The thing is, while they attempt to build their visuals around a fantastical world, they ground their script in the more "real" issues of big corporations running and fixing races. While they attempt to make a kid-friendly movie where the race winner drinks milk instead of champagne, they create races where crashes and deliberate collisions by drivers are commonplace. There's a fairly interesting amount of pseudo-science which vaguely explains how the cars are built and how they run, but all believability pretty much jumps out the window when one sees the cars pretty much defy all known laws of physics.
There's just too much going on at the same time for the brain to really process, and I've noticed that the people who've enjoyed themselves the most are my kids, to whom concerns like plot and credibility are pretty much superfluous.
There's a lot wrong with these movies, but they definitely deserve credit for trying something new. People who make these noble failures deserve some kind of pat on the back for trying something new, and well, for whatever it's worth, I'm giving it to them here.
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