Photos courtesy of Warner Bros. Actor Emile Hirsch, seen above and below, portrays the grown-up version of the protagonist in the action-adventure "Speed Racer." The live-action feature film is based on a 1960s TV cartoon series of the same name.

Warner Bros. Emile Hirsch and Christina Ricci, as Speed Racer and his former schoolmate Trixie, are relegated to somewhat cartoonish caricatures in "Speed Racer."

"Speed Racer" runs for a gluteus-deadening two hours and nine minutes.

Episodes of the animated '60s TV series that 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 worldview.

When it's moving — when our hero Speed 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 its look. A visual cacophony of day-glo colors, '60s retro kitsch and computer-rendered cars whose shiny plastic bodies reflect their surroundings, the movie might be likened to a high-tech Christmas ornament. And like said ornament, once you crack this yarn open there's nothing inside.

In the film's opening moments we are treated to a back story 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).

This segment is actually effective, particularly when little Speed (he appears to have ADD) uses his classroom time to imagine he's driving in the Grand Prix, surrounded by animated cars drawn in the style of a grade-schooler.

Back in the real world (the term is used advisedly), the now-grown Speed (Emile Hirsch) is a zooming fool determined to win for the sake of big bro Rex, who broke with the family and died after plowing into a mountain during a cross-country race.

But there's trouble brewing. Automotive magnate Royalton (Roger Allam) is impressed by Speed's style and wants him to join the Royalton team. This goes against everything the anti-corporate Ma-and-Pa Racers stand for.

Rejected, Royalton decides to play dirty.

Meantime, Speed is recruited by a government agent improbably named Inspector Detector (Benno Furmann) to help gather evidence that will break the back of a corporate/criminal race-fixing scheme involving Royalton and Cockney crime lord Cruncher Block (John Benfield).

Speed forms an alliance with Racer X, a mysterious masked driver who late in the film doffs his disguise to reveal that he's played by Matthew Fox. Somehow ninja assassins become involved, along with a family of Japanese car builders and unscrupulous drivers like Cannonball Taylor (Ralph Herforth) and Snake Oiler (Christian Oliver).

Which raises an interesting point: Are there any rules? The competitions in "Speed Racer" are more like bumper car rides or demolition derbies, with participants ramming each other nudging the other guy off cliffs. The vehicles are outfitted with presumably illegal grappling hooks, tire-shredding blades and pumps that spew oil in the path of pursuing drivers. Speed's machine can spring vertically into the air to avoid collisions. (For all we know it can actually fly, which sort of negates the whole idea of a road race.)

It's all infantile in the extreme, which wouldn't be bad if the Wachowskis exhibited an interesting postmodern take on the material or bothered to create some sort of internal logic for this world. And they miss numerous opportunities for humor, relying mostly on the unremarkable hijinks of Speed's candy-scarfing little brother, Spritle (Paulie Litt), and his pet chimpanzee.

The monkey, in fact, gives the film's best performance. At least it exhibits more life and better comic timing than the narcoleptic Goodman, the over-the-top cast of bad guys or the generic Hirsch. That last one's a real heartbreaker — Hirsch gave one of last year's best performances in Sean Penn's "Into the Wild," but here he's reduced to a hairstyle.

Christina Ricci is largely wasted as the grown-up Trixie, although her impossibly big eyes and round face nicely approximate the live-action equivalent of an anime heroine. The only suspense in the film comes from us wondering when she and Speed will actually lock lips. (When they finally do, it generates a cootie joke. Ha, ha.)

— Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.