Even though I'm five decades beyond the target audience, I submitted myself to Speed Racer. My kids are interested; and besides, the film's perpetrators cling to a respectable image, which they acquired with The Matrix. The writing-directing Wachowski brothers supposedly are innovators, iconoclasts, post-whatever-the-hell philosophers working in a medium of pop thrills. But who, other than the Platonic 9-year-old boy, is meant to go gai with the savoir of Speed Racer?

Which figure in this retooled version of a clunky old TV cartoon might represent the audience? I'd say the Wachowskis see us as the pet chimpanzee. What oppositional, anticorporate message is conveyed to us chittering apes? Win! Win all you can! And how does it feel to be the chimp, watching this nightmare of saturated primary colors? Save your money and find out at home. Have someone squirt ketchup and mustard into your eyes for two hours.

I detain you with this abuse of Speed Racer only because the picture so dismally exemplifies the tradition of filmmaking-by-condiment that long ago became standard in America whenever we head toward barbecue season. Steven Spielberg's Jaws first laid the hot dogs on the grill, according to all the conventional histories--and if you think of summer blockbusters primarily as marketing schemes, then the conventional histories are surely right. But if you also think of summer blockbusters as bearing a definable attitude toward their content and their audience, then the true precursor of Speed Racer did not appear until Star Wars.

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