All of which leads to an odd sensation of extremes, meaning that when you’re not jumping up and down in excitement, you’re most likely snoring in your seat.

As things unfold in colorful fashion, you can usually tell which end of the spectrum you’re on by how people are referring to the film’s teenage hero. If it’s giddy sports announcers screaming out the name "Speed Racer!" then the action is soaring; it’s when our young racer (played by an upbeat Emile Hirsch) is being called "Speed" by a concerned dad (John Goodman) or a proud mom (Susan Sarandon) that things slow to a crawl.

What’s most disheartening about this jerky, fifth-gear-first-gear rhythm, is that it’s surely something someone must have thought of during "Speed Racer’s" pre-production meetings. Adapting a short Saturday morning cartoon into a feature-length movie is tricky business, and no doubt someone foresaw the challenge in adapting a franchise of 30-minute stories into a fluid, 130-minute blockbuster.

But alas, "Speed Racer" is even choppier that some fans may fear. It is at once a sumptuous, groundbreaking, mind-blowing visual feast, and a marathon of increasingly irritating emotional peaks and troughs.

One can sum up the drama in three sentences: As a child, Speed Racer is enthralled by his older brother, a skilled race car driver who one day runs away from home, is smeared by the press as a cheater, and who dies in a fiery crash while competing in the back-alley, anything-goes races of a secondary racing league.

Years later, Speed is approached by Royalton (the fiendish Roger Allam), a greedy corporate auto executive who has essentially turned this form of futuristic, gravity-defying racing into a fixed sport. When Speed turns down Royalton’s offer as sponsor, and heads off instead to win on his own terms, Speed both becomes a target of Royalton’s corrupt consortium, and must overcome the nightmares he still endures of his long-lost brother.

Really, it’s a simple story of racing and redemption, but the way that the movie jaggedly cuts from one emotional apex to another is taxing on the senses. We see Speed fret over his late brother, stress out over his hostile altercation with Royalton, worry about disappointing his father and his younger brother (Nicholas Elia, the only actor who seems to be having a genuinely fun time here), and then furrow his brow as he fights off his dirty competitors on the race course. It’s too much to take in all at once, and "Speed Racer" truly feels like three movies in one.

Now with this important criticism out of the way, let me assure you: The racing sequences of this film, as molded and perfected by Andy and Larry Wachowski (the "Matrix" trilogy) are as visually imaginative and viscerally exciting as anything ever filmed.

They are colorful, decorative, exciting and involving. More than just the racing itself, the Wachowskis have also developed a form of rapid-fire editing - in which faces float past each other in front of a green screen - which almost revolutionizes the notion of editing. Where most films would cut from character to character, "Speed Racer’ blends one face with another, melding a long shot with a close-up. The result is a look and feel that parallels a comic book, where the reader scans from one drawn cell to the next.

For those who own a HDTV, and a Blu-Ray DVD player, "Speed Racer" is a title to put in your Netflix queue right now. It is a feast for the eyes, and truly a visual accomplishment for the ages. But hopefully the DVD will have an option to cut away the family scenes, and merely stitch together the racing footage. After all, we want to cheer with Speed Racer (Go, Speed Racer, go!), not watch him cry.