First of all let me say I disliked this anime with a passion. I hated several episodes for various reasons but mainly what bothered me most was the way Gonzo kept screwing up badly scenes that had some serious potential. There's a little good to be found here, though. Keep reading and I'll try to explain.

Animation

Gonzo has been a towering presence in Japanese animation for some years now. As they went on making some incredibly good and some incredibly bad anime they managed to set several standards. When you watch an anime by Gonzo you can usually assume that it's going to have a very high quality animation, regardless of your personal tast - that's one of the standards they set themselves and almost never failed to meet. E.g. I can imagine many people disliking Gankutsuou animation but that doesn't mean it isn't high quality and very original. Unfortunately, this anime has a below-average animation, barely average direction and little to offer in terms of originality.

Throughout the show there were all sort of cheap tricks like lots of people that didn't move a muscle, becoming part of the static background and unnatural and just plain ugly ways of simulating the sense of motion of cars and other objects; in other words what we have here seems like a 5-year-old anime made from some newly formed company with an empty wallet. Even the shading effects on characters and background elements felt rushed and simplistic.

If you have seen the first two episodes you'll disagree, but as you keep watching you can notice the animation level quickly go down. I'm not raising the vote just because they tried to hook people blowing more money on the first 2 eps.

Sound

Very very average. There are some nice tunes here and there, with nice I mean they complement sufficiently the atmosphere set by the graphics. The OP and ED are there just because they needed an OP and an ED. They don't match the anime at all. There were a couple of very good voice actors, especially Suitengu's. With "very good" I mean they are average but shine because of the badness of all the others. Heh. Sorry for making this section very short but there isn't really anything else to say.

Story

The story is partly inspired by Kubrik's Eyes wide shut. During the first episodes I thought I had identified another major influence but I'm not sure anymore so I won't talk about it.

The idea of the "secret club" where the powerful and wealthy go to satisfy their darkest desires is actually a very intriguing element. The Club is a shop where you can buy - for a very high price - anything otherwise forbidden by law and morals: human lives, dangerous sex games and other, uhm, earthly delights. The members of the Club can, under certain conditions, meet the Goddess, who will grant their greatest desire - turning them into monsters.

There's a message here: if you can't control your instincts, you may become a beast and end up destroying the objects of your passions, one after the other. That's why we see a lady who loves luxury and can't stop eating diamonds, a lover of female beauty who kills one beautiful woman after the other and so on. It's not much but it's there.

While Kubrik's work focused on showing the cold, dead, mechanical aspect of the act of feeding flesh to the demons inside us -- the aspect that emerges when the search for excitement, which should be an escape from the boring daily routine, becomes routine itself -- Speed Grapher shows a city being destroyed by the basic instincts of its inhabitants, a city burning with madness and very much alive. That's a very good setting, although most of what is in the anime is highly derivative from Kubrick's movie and other anime.

As a side note, there are many sex scenes. The fact that no naked bodies are shown for more than a couple of frames doesn't make the scenes any less explicit. This doesn't qualify as fanservice because it's part of the setting.

The plot, sadly, is there mainly to connect the fights between the protagonist and those rich, perverted guys turned to monsters; that's what the anime is really about. The routine is showing how nasty they are until they suddenly get their ass handed to them by our hero. That's all there is to this anime.

Fight after fight the true plot develops but it's all about the hero escaping together with another character from those who control the Club. It's not very interesting; it's quite repetitive, plus it's obviously been stretched to make the series 24 eps long. E.g.: one of the characters could easily track down the fleeing couple; he tries to do so a couple of times, losing them at the last moment, both times, for no good reason other than making the series go on a little longer. Before the whole thing becomes ridiculous, that character kind of disappears, again for no good reason, and the couple is left to themselves even though everyone wants to catch them (thus making the whole matter even more ridiculous). I mean, what the f*?

Character

This is another bad part of the anime. The setting would have provided a good background to develop some characters in different ways; showing them battling against their carnal desires, showing the contrast between true love and satisfaction of the senses, I don't know. I'm not a writer but I can see the huge amount of wasted potential.

The characters are mostly uninteresting and undeveloped. The evil guy gets some development through a flashback, meaning that instead of seeing it happen as one of the most prominent aspects of the show it's thrown in as an afterthought, like some kind of filler. That's very unfortunate, because this evil guy is more fascinating and interesting than most evil characters in most anime.

There are even some annoying characters and when I say annoying I mean unbearably so. They not only are unworthy of any attention, they actively bothered me every single second of screentime they got.

Personal enjoyment

Well... As I said I hated this thing because everytime I see great potential wasted, several things inside me grate against each other producing this horrible metallic sound. I really, really hated this anime. Like, a lot.

Overall

Watch it, don't watch it, it won't make a difference. If you don't have anything better to watch then go for it. This anime is noteworthy only for the way he manages to be so forgettable that it's upsetting. I recognize this show may have a public - somewhere. It may just be that some people will like the setting or the fights so much they'll even want to watch this a second time. Damn masochists.