Overall Rating
  Awesome: 22.31%
Worth A Look: 17.69%
Average: 30.77%
Pretty Bad: 14.62%
Total Crap: 14.62%
7 reviews, 88 user ratings
|
|
| Rat Race |
by Andrew Howe
"Great title song, shame about the rest"
|
It’s been more years than I care to remember, but I’m forced to admit that there was a time when I thrilled to the exploits of Burt Reynolds and his merry band in The Cannonball Run. Some years before that I derived a disturbing amount of enjoyment from It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, a ridiculously bloated comedy that laid the groundwork for the inevitable imitators. It’s a simple formula - assemble a cast of well-known actors, hand them a script that deals with a race across the country for a cash reward, and let Murphy’s Law have the last laugh. The format appears to have fallen out of favour in recent times, but Rat Race hauls the decomposing carcass into the limelight for one last reunion gig, and the surprise is that it’s considerably more palatable than its pedigree promises.After a bizarre credits sequence backed by the toe-tapping title song, we are introduced to the greed-fuelled crew with whom we’ll be spending the next couple of hours. The role call is answered by a sweet-tempered middle aged woman and her estranged daughter (Whoopi Goldberg and Lanai Chapman), a family man addicted to the illusion of easy money (Jon Lovitz), a disgraced football umpire hiding out from disgruntled fans (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), a pair of teenage dirtbags who specialise in fraudulent accident claims (Seth Green and Vince Vieluf), a narcoleptic Italian who appears to have been born without a brain (Rowan Atkinson), and an upstanding young lawyer who hooks up with a psychotically jealous helicopter pilot (Breckin Meyer and Amy Smart). If it seems like there’s not enough actors vying for your attention, don’t get too concerned - you’ll also be watching John Cleese strut his stuff as the casino owner who underwrites the race, with the likes of Dave Thomas and Wayne Knight (Newman from Seinfeld) thrown in for good measure.
A glance at the list of participants proves that the scriptwriter (Andy Breckman) had some idea of what he was doing – if Wacky Races taught us anything (besides the value of a good laugh), it’s that part of the fun comes from picking a favourite and cheering them to victory. You need a character for every possible demographic, and Breckman’s got most of the bases covered, but the trade-off is that the available screen time has to be evenly allocated amongst the cast of thousands. His solution is to paint the characters with broad brushstrokes, trusting in the actors to invest them with the required personality.
They certainly give it everything they’ve got, and the fact that we’re not dealing with the A-list means that we don’t have to worry about anyone’s ego undermining the proceedings. Lovitz has a fine time with a character that’s custom made for his talents, Goldberg wears the role of a ditzy but good-natured dame like a comfortable pair of sneakers, Meyer is a surprise stand-out as the only character who isn’t inherently self-serving, and the rest of the cast take whatever the script can throw at them in their stride. The only weak link is Atkinson – he’s lumbered with an exaggerated Italian stereotype that might have been amusing if we were still living in the 1960’s, and the result is an embarrassing performance that represents a criminal waste of talent.
The script operates on the assumption that everyone will attempt to shaft their fellow man if there’s cash on the line, but since it’s a lightweight comedy it’s not worth getting too concerned about this rampant generalisation. The philosophy works against gaining any kind of investment in the outcome (few of the characters are particularly likeable), but it makes a certain kind of sense when viewed in the context of the resolution.
The narrative is necessarily episodic in nature, cutting between the pitfalls experienced by the participants with monotonous regularity, and this is where the film unravels. The humour relies on uninspired physical comedy and contrived set pieces to get the laughs, and unless you’re a fan of base-level farce it’ll be hard-pressed to raise a smile. However, amidst the dreck there’s the odd moment of brilliance - Cleese gets to deliver one of his greatest comic monologues since the halcyon days of Monty Python, Dave Thomas steals the show whenever he appears onscreen, and Lovitz’s spur of the moment excursion to the “Barbie Museum” is worth the price of admission alone. If these scenes had been used as a model for the entire script we’d have had a laugh riot on our hands, but instead we’re left with a test of patience that throws enough inspiration into the mix to keep you from heading for the exit.It’s difficult to assemble a cast of this calibre and wind up with an abject failure on your hands, and certain scenes deliver the laughs you paid good money to receive. There simply aren’t enough worthwhile ideas to sustain a two hour film, but it’s a good-natured affair that almost justifies the genre’s unexpected resurrection.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=4740&reviewer=193
originally posted: 12/13/01 18:56:40
![[printer]](/images/icon/printer.gif) printer-friendly format
|
 |
USA
17-Aug-2001 (PG-13)
UK
N/A
Australia
03-Jan-2002
|
|
Articles 
subscribe to this feed
![[AllPosters.com]](/images/icon/ap.gif){kind=icon}
