SPEED RACER CRASHES

"Speed Racer" runs for a gluteus-deadening 2 hours and 9 minutes.Episodes of the animated '60s TV series which inspired it ran for only 22 minutes. And that was too long,The latest from the "Matrix"-making Wachowski brothers is an underpopulated, uncompelling and grotesquely overlong piece of eye-candy geared to a sixth-grader's world view.When it's moving — when our hero Speed (Emile Hirsch) is zapping his race car around a track resembling the innards of a gigantic pinball machine — the film offers the sort of visually distracting (if largely incoherent) overload today's kids revel in. But "Speed Racer" can't get even that right, sacrificing action for long passages of momentum-killing exposition.About the only area in which "Speed Racer" excels is in its look. A visual cacophony of Day-Glo colors, '60s retro kitsch and computer-rendered cars whose plastic bodies reflect their surroundings, the movie might be likened to a high-tech Christmas ornament.In the film's opening moments, we are treated to a backstory that describes young Speed's car-obsessed childhood, his adoration of his racing older brother Rex (Scott Porter), his romance with classmate Trixie and his relationship with his car-building Pops (John Goodman) and doting Mom (Susan Sarandon).