Review: SPEED ANGELS needs you to get out & push

While I doubt anybody had any serious expectations for Jingle Ma's SPEED ANGELS, the premise itself surely could have yielded something more trashy and entertaining than this cinematic lemon. The story of three female racing drivers, whose personal lives overlap and intersect more often off the track than their cars do on it, is a terminable bore that struggles to get out of first gear. For every minute of onscreen racing, we must endure half an hour of insufferable melodrama, making a two-hour movie feel like Le Mans.

Bing (Rene Liu) and Mei (Cecilia Cheung) are best friends as well as teammates in the Speed Angels all-girl motor racing team. However, on the day of her wedding, Bing discovers that her Japanese fiancé, Asano (Kitamura Kazuki) has eloped with Mei and as she chases after them inadvertently runs over her own sister. Bing turns to the bottle and it looks like the end for the Speed Angels. However, when head coach Gao Feng (Justin Han) is mugged in the street and leaps into a taxi to give chase, he discovers that his driver, the plucky Xiaoyi (Tang Wei) is a demon behind the wheel and he wastes no time in inviting her to try-out for the team, with irritating but inseparable cousin Gigi (Cheng Yi) in tow.

Needless to say, Xiaoyi's arrival causes friction between Bing and Gao, but when it is revealed that Mei has defected to arch-rivals Sakura, coached by none other than Asano - now going under the name Onidaka - Bing has no choice but to accept her new teammate and get back in the race if she has any hope of salvaging some dignity and winning the 1st Asian Heroine Race for the Speed Angels.

Frustratingly, this is just a brief outline of the emotional trials and tribulations that these young ladies must struggle with. Xiaoyi reveals she has crippling confidence issues when not behind the wheel of her taxi, harking back to the death of her father many years ago. Her overbearing mother (kung-fu legend Cheng Pei Pei) is supportive, but determined to marry her off to Coach Gao, despite his chequered history of relationships with his drivers. There's also an on-going flirtation between Gigi and assistant coach Joe (Jimmy Lin), as well as accusations of industrial espionage and any number of escalating problems that appear one after another to prevent our racers or the movie from ever getting out of the pits.

When Ma eventually does allow the film to put its foot down and get on with some actual racing, it is barely worth the wait. A staggering amount of the "action" is done using CGI, meaning that anything approaching a stunt or skilful piece of wheelwork looks like something out of an 80s arcade game or a pre-vis from CARS 2. As bad as Pixar's latest effort may have been in comparison to their normal outstanding level of quality, the race sequences are outstanding when compared to anything featured here.

Where there was clearly an opportunity for plenty of old school practical stunts, SPEED ANGELS seems to have been rendered largely from Jingle Ma's laptop. For the remainder of the race time, the cars are shot in incredibly low quality video, with rapid fire editing, clearly designed to create an exciting aesthetic, but instead resulting in unintelligible sequences where it is almost impossible to determine exactly what is going on without He Jiong's irritating commentary.

SPEED ANGELS is a tedious string of betrayals, personal crises and melodramatic calamities that have absolutely nothing to do with fast cars or competitive sport, and precious little that could be identified as quality drama. The angels battle alcoholism, insecurity, physical abuse, selfishness, injury and each other. At one point they even rally together for a collective karaoke rendition of Chris Ledoux's "Look at you girl" over their radio mics, but never once are we convinced that any of these women are professional athletes. 

To cite SPEED ANGELS as car crash entertainment would be to pay it a compliment it scarcely deserves. There is nothing spectacular about the film, not even its failure - it is a knackered old junker that should have never been taken out on the road. All it really deserves is to be abandoned on an embankment somewhere, where perhaps it could offer shelter to a wandering family of raccoons.