10 years since 'Speed Racer': Did it deserve its lousy review?

Go, Speed Racer?

Ten years after Lana and Lilly Wachowski's eye-popping Speed Racer debuted to less-than-glowing reviews (40% on Rotten Tomatoes), fans of the film are uniting on social media to share what was an unpopular opinion back in 2008: It's a masterpiece?

Yes, they're talking about that Speed Racer starring Emile Hirsch and inspired by the racing cartoon. The movie became a trending topic online Wednesday with movie lovers praising the film on Twitter.

For example, one fan tweeted, "America just didn’t deserve such a wholehearted, unironic, and earnest movie about a guy who drives really fast in cars."

Another said that "no one believed us" that the film was so good.

And many shared the sentiment that Speed Racer wasn't given the respect it deserved: It's a "slept on visual treat!"

But in 2008, USA TODAY did not find much of a need for Speed. Here's former critic Claudia Puig's 1-and-a-half-star review of the film which had this headline: "Speed Racer limps around the track"

It may be a tricked-out ride, butSpeed Racer is too long for kids to sit still and too frenetic for their parents. Maybe teens and twenty-somethings will pick up the slack.

For a movie about velocity, the excitement factor is low and the races feel like a drag. Perhaps that has a lot to do with its length: 2 hours and 15 minutes, which is at least a half-hour too long for a movie based on a cartoon. Or maybe it's the predictable story about a guy who goes up against crooked corporate sponsors.

Racer can look vibrant with its blend of live action and computer-generated animation. But the cars zipping around the track look interchangeable, and the action sequences are more video game than movie.

Writers/directors (Lana and Lilly) Wachowski (The Matrix trilogy) attracted some major acting talent. Emile Hirsch is fine as Speed, though the role doesn't exactly offer the challenge of his Oscar-caliber performance in Into the Wild. Christina Ricci is his girlfriend, Trixie, and Susan Sarandon and John Goodman play his parents.

As a child, Speed Racer is not much of a scholar, preferring instead to hang around with his idol, older brother Rex. When Rex dies in a mysterious crash, Speed honors his memory by following in his footsteps.

Doggedly loyal to the family racing business, he turns down a profitable sponsorship deal from a conglomerate, so Royalton Industries' megalomaniacal owner (Roger Allam) promises to ruin Speed's career. Speed, determined to restore the family honor by competing in the cross-country rally that took his brother's life, teams up with Racer X (Matthew Fox) to expose Royalton's corruption.

Though it's a simple tale that should be understandable for viewers as young as 6, the filmmakers put so much emphasis on visual panache that narrative coherence suffers.

Yes, it's a candy-colored Day-Glo world, but there's a liveliness missing from this lead-footed Speed Racer.

Today, it's sounding like those former "teens and twenty-somethings" are, in fact, picking up the slack.