It's 27 minutes, feel like 35-40 minutes.
and they felt as if nothing happened in the first 15 minutes, and neither in the last 4.
The coolest scene is at the very beginning, a race involving the video-gamey ghostcar of an overly-humble driver named "Loser King".
It lasts less than 5 minutes.
After the intro scene, there's a very confusing one.
A girl enters the room, speaks, then touches the protagonist (in no useful way), who awakes just fine without his heart.
The scene cuts, and he has a device on his chest, which he didn't seem to need before.
either she did real-time magic to fill his literal empty heart, they simply didn't show us the surgery, or both.
Lip service is paid to the world and worldbuilding, through dollops of direct exposition, making
the duration seem longer than it is, but it actually doesn't matter.
We're told stuff, not shown, and what we're told is inconsequent.
Landscape certainly doesn't matter.
There's a part where the protag crosses like 25 different environments in 30 seconds, and expresses confusion about this;
it was not a moment of rapid exciting action, just boredom.
We see the car hopping about as the background changes, and at that time we don't see what happens to competitors either.
Speaking of competitors, they don't matter.
The one time competition is meaningful is when a sword car competes with the rival's car
and the protag competes with someone else's car.
In REDLINE, the girl is in the car as part of being kept alive, to motivate protag and audience, and to create a satisfying romantic arc.
Here, the girl goes with the protagonist in the race, but the only reason is so that she can be there in a moment late in the story which is supposed to be cool and exciting - but it's really lame - only to finally and unsatisfyingly bounce out.
That's pointless, she's just the engineer, it's extra weight in the car, she has NO REASON AT ALL to do this.
The Gainax "TT Gurren Lagann"-eyecatch style of the character visuals is by far the coolest about Tailenders.
Everything else, you don't see any more than 15 seconds.
The protagonist sure does have a car, but you don't see it well, because of the harsh black colors, the briefness, and visual noise.
The end of the story is really lame.
Nobody wins, nobody loses.
The story is basically a sprint race, which at the end, is thematically treated like a circular, track race,
in the sense of emphasizing circularity and endlessness.
This could work, but it's done badly, and moreover, they could've simply used a circuit-based race, if this is what they wanted to emphasize.
We last see the girl, and it ends in a cliffhanger, with her saying she's gonna try to win next.
This is a racing story in which the race does not matter.
