Its not often you find yourself wishing for an horrendous and preferably fatal road accident, but the thought most definitely popped into my head whilst watching Rat Race.
This botched and cripplingly unfunny road movie brings together a platoon of Hollywoods most desperate, each one seemingly willing to do anything to make themselves popular again. Anything, that is, except make a decent movie.
John Cleese, whos in danger of becoming as big a sell-out merchant as any of them, plays a wealthy casino owner eager to give his filthy-rich clients some exciting new events to throw their dirty great wads of cash at. So he stuffs $2 million into a locker on the other side of the country, selects a group of randoms from his casino floor to go after it, and opens a book on wholl get there first.
Among the selected cretins chasing the loot are Whoopi Goldberg and Lanei Chapman as a mother-and-daughter team, Seth Green and Vince Vieluf as a pair of bungling brothers, Cuba Gooding Jr. as a nationally-despised football ref and Jon Lovitz as a pig-ignorant family man. Perhaps most irritating of the lot, however, is Rowan Atkinson with his portrayal of a narcoleptic Italian (its a good job he eventually tells you what his nationalitys supposed to be, because you certainly cant guess from the accent). A viewing of this, and of course Johnny English, can unfortunately lead to only one question why has Atkinson stopped being funny? That you could watch three whole episodes of Blackadder in the time spent taking in this drivel doesnt bear thinking about.
What really grates about Rat Race isnt that its a dumb comedy its that its picked the very worst aspects of all dumb comedies ever made and tried to piece together an entertaining end product out of it. Director Jerry Zucker is so busy throwing a seemingly endless line of supposedly hare-brained scenarios at us, that he doesnt stop to think what reasons there might be for finding these scenarios funny. Its like being shown a list of punchlines without knowing what the jokes are supposed to be that go before each one.