Variety liked “Speed Racer.” Hitsville liked “Speed Racer.”

Nobody else did.

Joe Morgenstern in the WSJ:

This toxic admixture of computer-generated frenzy and live-action torpor succeeds in being, almost simultaneously, genuinely painful — the esthetic equivalent of needles in eyeballs — and weirdly benumbing, like eye candy laced with lidocaine. “The Matrix” gave us the trippy pleasure of bullet time, a super-slo-mo vision of the world. “Speed Racer” gives us the paradox of a drive time that’s super-fast and all but interminable.

Carina Chocano in the LAT:

It’s hard to imagine a movie better suited to the aesthetic tastes of an addled 8-year-old boy than “Speed Racer,” or one worse suited to his attention span.Unless, of course, he enjoys speechifying.For a movie about speed and forward momentum, “Speed Racer” provides very little of either, though it does explode into spurts of frenetic, confusing and hard-to-follow action — and that’s just on the racetracks.

M. Sragow in the Baltimore Sun:

Despite the warmth and humor of Goodman and Sarandon, the family-circle gags are groaners. Although the Wachowskis tap into the collective unconsciousness of roadside culture, what they deliver at best are expensive cheap thrills - bumper cars put on rollercoasters.
[…]
The only hope for this movie is that its vibrant hues will hypnotize youngsters the way Technicolor did their great-grandparents. The Wachowskis fail at creating “fun for the whole family.” In Speed Racer, their tricks are for kids.

A.O. Scott:

The childhood experience the Wachowskis evoke is not the easy delight of lolling in the den watching one cartoon after another, but rather the squirming tedium of sitting in the back seat on an endless family car trip, your cheek taking on the texture of the vinyl seat as some grown-up lectures you on the beauty of the passing scenery.

J. Hoberman:

“Production design” is a poor term to describe Owen Paterson’s avidly garish look. Gaudier than a Hindu-temple roof, louder than the Las Vegas night, Speed Racer is a cathedral of glitz. The movie projects a Candy Land topography of lava-lamp skies and Hello Kitty clouds—part Middle Earth, part mental breakdown—using a beyond-Bollywood color scheme wherein telephones are blood orange, jet planes electric fuchsia, and ultra-turquoise is the new black.

Call it Power Kitsch, Neo-Jetsonism, or Icon-D—this film could launch a movement.

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon:

Every once in a while I’m hit with a movie whose existence I find impossible to comprehend. Who is this movie for? Did anyone involved take the time to have an actual thought — even just one — before investing time, care and money into this thing? Andy and Larry Wachowski’s “Speed Racer” is so bereft of intelligence, style and excitement that I can’t figure out who in the world it’s supposed to appeal to: baby boomers nostalgic for the old Japanamation cartoon on which it’s based? Parents who want to cultivate ADD in their kids? The picture is bankrupt in terms of everything but color, and even then, its palette suggests not careful selection but no selection: There isn’t a single neon-jellybean or retro-flower-power color that isn’t represented in “Speed Racer” — if a color is bright, it’s in there. That’s not visual boldness; it’s cowardice — and that’s only the beginning of the picture’s problems.

Anthony Lane in the New Yorker:

A four-year-old will be reduced to a gibbering but highly gratified wreck; an eight-year-old will wander around wearing a look that was last seen on the face of Dante after he met Beatrice. But what about the rest of us? True, our eyeballs will slowly, though never completely, recover, but what of our souls? I reckon the M.P.A.A. should use the advent of “Speed Racer” to revive an old ratings symbol: a big Roman X, meaning “of no conceivable interest to anyone over the age of ten.”