Films Out This Week

May 11 2008 Mickey Mcmonagle

SPEED RACER (PG) ***

The Wachowski brothers don't like to make life easy for their audiences. You would have thought after the disappointment of the Matrix sequels they may have eased off on the reference cramming, toned down the cleverness and concentrated on a good story.

But their comeback film is not that sensible or predictable.

In this adaptation of the 1960s anime racing series Mach Go Go Go they again ramp up the weirdness and give us a plot so confusing and littered with unnecessary pits tops that even the most devoted fans of the original series will find it hard to stay engaged.

There are major pluses - the setting for the race sequences is a wonderful, incredibly-styled CGI universe where everything is bright, bold and colourful. The insanely fast, gravity-defying T-180 racing cars loop, spin and plunge through tracks seemingly made of melted down fairground lollies twirled into bizarre constructions.

But away from the track is a duller world, with actors working against an irritating 2D background.

Christina Ricci, John Goodman, Matthew Fox, Susan Sarandon and Emile Hirsch do their best but away from the action sequences there is too much pretension, too much trying to be arty and too damn little plot.

Overall then, a film that looks great in large chunks so is definitely worth seeing on the big screen. Just expect the usual Wachowski confusion and sense of something missing and you won't go far wrong.

DOOMSDAY (18) ***

I love the premise of this film, with Scotland sealed off from the rest of the UK after an outbreak of the deadly Reaper virus in Glasgow.

The problem is director Neil Marshall evidently loves too many other films and nicks bits willy nilly from them, cramming too much into his own movie for it to really stand alone.

A team of soldiers and scientists are sent into the walled-off Scotland 20 years on to try and find a cure, discovering an entirely different country to the one that previously existed. It's a Mad Max rip-off world, in fact.

Throw in a hefty dose of Escape From New York, plenty of 28 Days Later and God only knows what else and you begin to understand why there is just too much going on at times.

As usual with Marshall, there is plenty of promise - he just does not quite deliver fully.

Hopefully that will come.