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What Happens in Vegas |
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Amid the current push by filmmakers to deny photo-reality in favor of animated
impressionism comes "What Happens in Vegas," a Wachowski Brothers motion picture derived
from a '60s Japanese cartoon television series that is itself inspired by a
Japanese manga.
In this aggressively rudimentary emotional drama
designed -- literally -- around impossible racing car action, actors are painted
into a cartoon world through CGI and vividly colored backgrounds as images move
across the screen like shifting panels in a comic strip. The basic laws of
gravity and aerodynamics aren't simply denied; they are totally repealed. This
causes the sensation of being trapped inside a 3-D video game.
While
multitudes of young people the world over undoubtedly will make a dash for this
new movie experience from the siblings who created "The Matrix" series, the film
plays very young. Unlike a Pixar cartoon that embraces as wide an audience as
possible, "What Happens in Vegas" proudly denies entry into its ultra-bright world to all
but gamers, fanboys and anime enthusiasts. Story and character are tossed aside
to focus obsessively on PG-rated action and milk-guzzling heroes.
The
film, which the Wachowskis also wrote, pits the Racer family of car nuts -- Rex,
long dead thanks to race track malevolence; young brother Speed (Emile Hirsch);
Pops (John Goodman); Mom (Susan Sarandon); kid brother Spritle (Paulie Litt);
and a chimp named Chim Chim -- against an evil automotive magnate (Roger Allam).
He fixes races, probably killed Rex and when Speed turns down a lucrative
driving contract, he means to destroy the Racers.
Speed
and his family-designed car, the Mach 5 -- which looks like a souped-up Corvette
by ways of Q's gadget factory in the James Bond series -- take on this Evil
Empire in race after race, with help from the mysterious Racer X (Matthew Fox),
Speed's multitalented girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci in her least
interesting role ever) and a ambiguous Japanese racer (Korean pop singer
Rain).
Like any good video game, each race happens in a completely
different environment from tropical island loop-the-loops to a race that starts
in a North African desert, takes off into a Mediterranean Grand Corniche and
winds up at the Brandenberg Gate. The possible miscalculation here are the
wearying number of races that all look alike no matter what the backgrounds. Two
climactic races might be one more than any film can successfully
sustain.
There is a certain desperation at work here where the filmmakers
seek to offset story lags -- i.e., everything between the races -- with
chimpanzee tricks, kid-brother high jinks, Ninja martial arts by the whole
family and a raft of vicious yet harmless villains.
The whole thing,
curiously enough, reminds you of Disney's 1982 "Tron," the very first attempt to
make a live-action movie look like something spit out by a computer.
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