20 great movies from the past 20 years: Speed Racer

I’m counting down to the 2025 best-of-the-year season by recommending 20 of my favorite movies from the past 20 years. Here are the previous entries, if you want to catch up:

2005: Caché
2006: Undisputed II: Last Man Standing
2007: Sunshine

When my partner and I got married six years ago, it was in a tiny ceremony outside the National Portrait Gallery in DC. We only wanted our immediate family there, but we also wanted to celebrate with our friends and other loved ones. So we held a joint bachelor party at a pizza place, with drinks, good food, and an excellent playlist curated by my brother.

But we both love movies, and they had to play a role in our celebration. So we picked a movie to put on the TVs at the pizza place, to set an ambience – Stop Making Sense, probably our favorite movie ever made, and one whose iconography was all over our invitations. But when we arrived, the TV audio didn’t work, so we had to pivot. While Stop Making Sense is a feast for the senses, it is a concert movie, and watching a concert movie without the audio does take a significant cut out of the experience. So we added Speed Racer, a non-stop array of visual delights and creative decisions, to the night's festivities (it was a hit with the crowd). It’s also one of my favorite sports movies ever made, not only because of how well it accomplishes its “live-action anime” aesthetic, but because of how earnestly it treats the genre.

I’m launching a podcast later this month about sports movies, and as we’ve been recording the episodes, it’s been interesting to see where movies in the genre lean into and diverge from the established formulas. Despite looking unlike anything else in the genre, Speed Racer is a sports story through and through, featuring a young prodigy (Emile Hirsch) following in his brother’s racing footsteps, and how the intertwining of business and sports can create unique pressures and tough decisions for young athletes from less wealthy backgrounds. 

One of the most prominent elements of Speed Racer – and I think it’s one that many Western audiences aren’t all that comfortable with – is its sincerity.

This is true of most Wachowski projects, as their dialogue tends to be achingly earnest, but within their oeuvre I think it works best in Speed Racer. For starters, when you’re working in a world where your main character is literally named Speed Racer, the only logical choice is to lean in. But I find their style of dialogue also thrives when paired with heightened visuals (like in The Matrix) as opposed to something that feels in our real world, like Sense8, where those same choices can fall flat. (Bound is the exception here, but Bound is exceptional, so that checks out.) Even more crucially, Speed Racer is about this struggle itself, about a person trying to engage with their art (in this case, racing) earnestly in a world that compels you to be cynical.

Speed Racer is also the closest thing we’ve ever gotten to a live-action anime. It was a real “movies can look like that???” moment for me, and few since have come close to reaching its highs. It’s the most compelling argument for how CGI can make space for new visual experiences this side of Avatar: The Way of Water, depicting the essence of speed in a way no other racing movie has been able to capture before or since. It’s a stress test for what can be done with new technology in filmmaking, crashing images, colors, and ideas together with a reckless abandon that somehow sticks its landing on the emotional beats and the palpable, vibrant world it builds. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that no one has gotten anywhere close, with newer tech, in the nearly two decades since. 

My love for Speed Racer comes without an ounce of nostalgia for the IP itself. I never watched the show growing up, and have never been super into cars (motorsports, yes, but only relatively recently). But Speed Racer is yet another movie that helped solidify my taste in art, reminding me of the value of artists who are confident in their sincerity, and how that can translate to a completeness of vision. And, of course, the everlasting value of “seeing some crazy shit you’ll never see anywhere else.”

Speed Racer is available at digital rental/purchase on VOD vendors.