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Finally, a movie for everyone who found the Cannonball Run
films to be a tad too cerebral. In the
tradition of those Burt Reynolds road epics and Stanley Kramer's gargantuan anti-comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad
World comes Rat Race, the cheerfully
moronic new farce from gagmeister Jerry Zucker (Airplane!, Ruthless People).
Reviving the tried-and-true formula for a whole new crop of
11-year-olds, Zucker has assembled a month's worth of Hollywood Squares castoffs, including Rowan
Atkinson, Jon Lovitz, Kathy Najimy, John Cleese, Breckin Meyer, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Dave
Thomas, Seth Green, Kathy Bates, Paul Rodriguez and center square Whoopi Goldberg for the
block. (What, did Jamie Farr lose his sheik
outfit?) The group has been assembled by Las
Vegas tycoon Donald Sinclair (Cleese, sporting a distracting set of fake choppers), who
has selected them at random by means of a handful of gold coins planted in his casino's
slot machines (shades of Willy Wonka). Sinclair and his fellow billionaire gambling
buddies have a new wager in mind: they've placed a red duffel bag containing two million
dollars in cash inside a locker at a train station in Silver Springs, New Mexico. The chosen ones are each given a key to the
locker and set loose. Whoever reaches the
locker first gets the cash.
It sounds like the premise for a new FOX reality series, and by the
time you finish reading this paragraph, it probably will be. In any case, the Vegas airport is quickly knocked
out of commission and our motley crew of contestants are forced to find alternate means of
transportation. Owen Templeton (Gooding,
Jr.), a football referee who blew the opening coin toss of a hotly contested match-up,
flags down a cab driver who lost a bundle on the game.
Enrico Pollini (Atkinson), a narcoleptic with an ostensibly comical accent, teams
up with an ambulance driver (Seinfeld's Wayne
Knight) rushing a human heart to El Paso for a transplant.
Nick Shaffer (Meyer) enlists a cute helicopter pilot (Amy Smart) in hopes of
beating the road-bound competition. Other vehicles called into service in pursuit of the
jackpot include a hot air balloon, a bus loaded with Lucille Ball impersonators and
Hitler's private jeep.
Andrew Breckerman's script is relentless in its pursuit of laughs -
there's no situation too contrived, no slapstick too juvenile for Rat Race. It's
got the kind of comic set pieces that feel reverse engineered, as if Breckerman began with
the payoff (say, Jon Lovitz sporting a brush mustache and spouting mock-German in front of
an audience of World War II vets), then sweated his way back through the improbable chain
of events that leads up to it. With his
brother David and their partner Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker revitalized this type of
rapid-fire tomfoolery in the 1980's with Airplane!,
Top Secret! and
the first Naked Gun. Those movies blended deadpan acting with MAD
magazine-style parody and a shameless affinity for bad puns and off-the-wall sight gags. But Rat Race
is closer in spirit to the later Naked Gun
entries. It's innocuous enough, and the sheer
volume of monkeyshines assures a handful of genuine belly laughs, but the misfires far
outnumber the direct hits to the funny bone.
- Scott Von Doviak
