So what makes people say this about the movie? It demonizes the big business that rules the racing sector, which in the film is Royalton Industries, which is ruled by the evil Roger Allam, who manipulates every outcome and cheats and cheats to shore up his profits.
Somehow it just didn’t sting. What we really have here is the universal, conventional sports-movie plot, which has been repeated ten thousand times: the underdog with no money or power goes up against the well-funded and well-connected champion machine and prevails through guts and determination, etc., and, in the course of it refusing to be bought out or to sell out. The crowd goes wild. So far as I know, this is the most typical plot device one can imagine. Maybe it could be otherwise: the poor and unconnected upstart gets beat by the rich and well-connected champion, but as much as I like big business, this strikes even me as slightly boring.
Besides, big business isn’t always saintly. In a mixed economy such as ours, money does lead to a form of corruption, and there is a scene in the movie that really makes this clear. An attorney for Royalton shows up at the Speed Racer household to announce a lawsuit for infringement of intellectual property. The father protests and the lawyer says, we’ll let the jury decide. That was a great scene that actually highlighted the ways in which patent law is really used in the real world!
Might the film makers have had a score to settle against the capitalist rich? Probably, but that hardly makes them different from just about every other living human being these days (or so it seems to me). In any case, there were plenty enough other reasons not to like this film (that annoying brother and his chimp and the goofy girlfriend, for example), so better to save the free-market fire for other more well-suited targets.
As for the CGI, yes, it is unbelievably great.
