Buy it... if you like your jazzy action scores to slap you upside the head with their boundless enthusiasm, excessive volume, and roaring pace.

Avoid it... if you're fresh out of painkillers and don't want to risk the inevitable headache that the Speed Racer score will give a high proportion of the listening public.

Giacchino

Speed Racer: (Michael Giacchino) Exhaustion. For the majority of viewers of the Wachowski brothers' adaptation of the classic Speed Racer cartoon, as well as the music that accompanies it so faithfully, that's the one guaranteed result. A film like this exists to re-define the term "eye candy," for there's little other than the visuals to retain your interest. The old cartoon's story is preserved in the form of the Racer family and the boy Speed Racer's ascension to the top of the future's wild new form of auto racing. The film's style of inserting the live-action actors into a glitzy, inventive universe of colors and movement overwhelms what little interest the story has to offer, or, for that matter, nearly any other production element. Among 2008's early summer competition at the box office, Speed Racer fared poorly, shunned by audiences likely unfamiliar with the historical significance of the show's influence on Japanese animation and not inclined to suffer from the burned retinas that are suggested by the film's trailers and its extremely long running time. In almost every regard, Michael Giacchino's score for the movie suffers from exactly the same set of detracting circumstances. The music, like the film's visuals, only exacerbates the sensory overload, further exhausting the viewer or listener with hyperactive and flamboyant sounds that attempt so hard to fit with the environment (and pay significant tribute to Nobuyoshi Koshibe's music along the way) that a headache is just waiting to happen. Part of this auditory overload is likely due to Giacchino's self-professed love of the show and its music. The composer's loyalty to both the theme of the show and its general instrumental style is extremely impressive, especially in his effort to work fragments of the theme into a wild variety of different circumstances, even if that only entails some creative counterpoint most of the time. Also to be commended is the technical prowess of Giacchino's work, including its orchestration and performance.

While the music for Speed Racer may eventually only attract a very small audience, it certainly reaffirms Giacchino's talents when both inspired and working under a reportedly tight recording schedule. Those positive attributes of Giacchino's attempt to launch the music of Speed Racer into the 21st Century, however, fail to create a cohesive whole, and debate will linger about how much of this problem can be attributed to the film's lack of clear direction. Parts of this score give you the same feeling as John Powell's Horton Hears a Who! earlier in the year because of both scores' tendency to impress in the moment but lack a cohesive heart or soul when trying to present themselves as a combined work. The music on album constitutes only roughly half of what Giacchino wrote for Speed Racer, but that still clocks in at an hour in length, and most listeners will be fed up with the hammering effect of the score's incessantly wild action cues by the half-hour mark. Part of this effect is caused by the intensity of the ensemble and the frantic pacing of each and every action cue. A large orchestral ensemble, joined by choir in a handful of major cues, is stretched to the limits of its tonal diversity. The percussion section gets a significant workout, from the medium range drums and wild xylophone that hail back to the cartoon, and the electric bass, occasional electric guitar contribution, omnipresent brass, and usual shrieking flutes on top make for as dynamic a soundscape as you could imagine. The score often breaks into the action and jazz blend that Giacchino has utilized well recently in his career, though the extreme enthusiasm and accelerated tempi of the jazz here is aimless and accomplishes no greater purpose in the score. Character development cues, which exist in the score only to the extent that they seem forced into both it and the film, are few and far between, and they provide only basic thematic exploration of no particular interest.

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The score does start well, interestingly, with "I Am Speed" setting the stage with a strong rhythmic crescendo and "World's Best Autopia" opening with the first of the somewhat alluring female vocals that exist throughout the score before striking up one of the score's more attractive and subdued rhythms. The choir's contribution in the latter half of the score, including "The Maltese Ice Cave," "Reboot," and "Let Us Drink Milk," plays like forced fantasy, though the two latter, climactic cues are highlights of the album because they finally take it easy on the volume and allow some fluidity to their thematic enunciation. The integration of the title theme into the actual finale of "Let Us Drink Milk" is nicely handled. The theme is broken into its two distinctive parts by Giacchino for use throughout the score; both the rising three-note phrase and the more memorable, swinging four-note repetitions are well integrated into the action cues. For purists, Giacchino provides full treatment of these ideas in "Speed Racer," which concludes the album with a performance complete with lyrics. There do seem to be other themes woven into the fabric of Speed Racer, but with a headache from the nearly non-stop action and only marginal clarity to any of those ideas, they don't have an appreciable impact for someone who has no interest in the story. Overall, fans of the original show's music will find much to smile about in Giacchino's score for this film. Otherwise, collectors of the composer will be better served seeking the jazz from Ratatouille, the action from Mission: Impossible III, or the two together in The Incredibles. Without a doubt, Speed Racer is the least readily listenable album of all four, but this is in no part because of the score's technical mastery. Rather, it's simply too explosively loud and incessantly enthusiastic to tolerate for lengthy periods of time... almost like those annoying guys in television commercials who try to sell you household cleaning products while shouting their praise for the item and never yielding to take a breath. They're effective, but after a while, most of us either mute the bastard or change the channel. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Michael Giacchino reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.37 (in 21 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.23 (in 12,367 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.