Rat Race

Review by By Clint Morris

I still remember it as if were yesterday. It was the newspaper advertisement for "Cannonball Run II". Boy was I excited! It wasn't everyday a movie came along that featured half a dozen major stars in the one motion picture. The film died at the box office and henceforth, the all-star caper genre was laid to rest.

It's been a long time between drinks for the all-star chase movie, but now, some 15 odd years later, director Jerry Zucker is dusting off the genre with "Rat Race".

"Rat Race" is a gas. It's a gut-busting caper where a circus worth of well-known comic performers with the zaniest of personalities are passing the spiel to one another like a baton. And the familiar faces farce is all in the name of a big-time money hunt - the competitive pursuit of $2 million, crammed in a duffel bag stashed in a train-station locker by the event manager, a filthy rich Casino Manager (Cleese).

Competitors in the Las Vegas to Silver City pursuit include a sports referee (Cuba Gooding Jr) who ends up hitching a bus with a group of Lucille Ball look-alikes, Jon Lovitz and his family of four who scrounge Hitler's car for the jaunt, Rowan Atkinson as a narcoleptic Italian contestant and Wayne Knight as an ambulance driver, Whoopi Goldberg and Lanai Chapman as a mother-daughter team, Seth Green and newcomer Vince Vieluf as rule-breaking brothers and Breckin Meyer and Amy Smart as subordinate professionals.

The blasé silliness of Rat Race succeeds via several belly busting scenes - one involving a flying cow attached to a hot air balloon, another involving the Lovitz families excursion to a "Barbie" museum with a difference, and numerous mishaps by Green and Vieluf's characters - the funniest being their attempt to pull down the airport tower with their car.

Of the performers, several stand out. Green and Vieluf's dorky twosome are irresistibly inane and vivacious and Rowan Atkinson is funny. His knack for physical comedy is again put on show. Also memorable is John Cleese hamming it up in a humorous bit as the unscrupulous Casino Manager.

After so many disappointments of late and "Rat Race" being one of the least attractive offers on show at the moment - it's great to find a movie rising above all expectations. Director Zucker (The Naked Gun, Flying High) has obviously got a real aptitude for comic inevitability, making even the lamest of gags draw chuckle. And While it mightn't be the funniest film of the year, or even the cornerstone of the genre, it's consistently funny and delivers on it's pledge as being an immense, thunderous, dumb, mad - but hilarious - movie.

3.5 out of 5

Rat Race
Australian release: Commences January 1st across Australia
Cast: Whoopi Goldberg, Cuba Gooding Jr, Jon Lovitz, Rowan Atkinson, Breckin Meyer, Amy Smart, Seth Green, John Cleese, Wayne Knight, Dean Cain.
Director: Jerry Zucker.
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