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If your child ate a large bowl of Skittles and a box of Crayolas, he might get the same colorful, nausea-inducing sugar buzz that comes from watching "Speed Racer" for more than two hours.

This is a movie that takes its theme-song lyric, "Go, Speed Racer, go," as gospel. It is all movement, all razzle-dazzle, all go-go-go. This worked well for the Wachowski brothers when they created the groundbreaking vision of "The Matrix" trilogy - but in this adaptation of the '60s Japanese cartoon pitched at the preteen audience, it's a hyperactive Technicolor blur.

When we meet Speed Racer (played by "Into the Wild's" Emile Hirsch), he's preparing for a big motor race and thinking back to his childhood love of racing - and his hero, his older brother Rex (Scott Porter), who left the family auto business after a falling-out with Pops Racer (John Goodman) and was killed in a road rally. After Speed wins his race, he entertains an offer to race for auto mogul Royalton (the perfectly oily Roger Allam), an offer that comes with a threat of career destruction if Speed says no.

Will Speed race for Royalton? Will Racer Motors go it alone and face bankruptcy? Or will he team up with rival racer Taejo Togokhan (played by the one-named Asian pop singer Rain) and the mysterious Racer X (Matthew Fox) to get the dirt on Royalton, the other moguls and the mobsters corrupting the World Racing League? And how can Trixie (Christina Ricci), Speed's helicopter-flying girlfriend, help out? And what about Speed's pesky little brother Spritle (Paulie Litt) and the family pet chimp, Chim-Chim?

For all the plot the Wachowskis crowd into their supercharged spectacle, they are more focused on the slam-bang action and editing. Dialogue scenes fly by, with facial close-ups passing each other in frenzied montages. The fight scenes, which are numerous and rather violent for a PG-rated film, are fast-paced and kinetic. And the centerpiece car races, all done with computer animation with an outlandishness of design that makes Pixar's "Cars" look like a NASCAR documentary, erects Hot Wheels' loop-the-loop architecture in a sea of "Blade Runner" neon.

The confounding thing about "Speed Racer" is figuring out what the target audience is. The language (such as when Pops tells Royalton that "we'll kick your ass") and the crude humor seem to stretch the PG envelope. At the same time, the Wachowskis invest far too much screen time on the supposedly hilarious antics of Spritle and Chim-Chim, which anyone over 7 will find tiresome.

Then there's the sheer unrelenting size of the enterprise. At 134 minutes, "Speed Racer" throws so much color on the screen for so long, younger viewers (and even some not-so-young ones) will get worn out and want this ride to stop.

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* SEAN P. MEANS can be reached at movies@sltrib.com or 801-257-8602. Send comments to livingeditor@sltrib.com.

Speed Racer

WHERE: Theaters everywhere.

WHEN: Opens today.

RATING: PG for sequences of action, some violence and language.

RUNNING TIME: 134 minutes.

BOTTOM LINE: The '60s cartoon is reinvented as a visual spectacle that doesn't know when to slow down.