Opinion

Rat Race

Dir: Jerry Zucker
Starring: Rowan Atkinson, John Cleese, Whoopi Goldberg, Breckin Meyer, Seth Green, Cuba Gooding Jnr

For the entertainment of a group of his wealthy customers, Las Vegas casino owner Donald Sinclair (Cleese) arranges for 6 randomly-chosen individuals to be offered participation in a race. The object of the race is to be the first to reach a locker containing $2,000,000 in Silver City, Mew Mexico, and there are no rules. The participants end up being a humiliated football referee, a recently-reunited mother (Goldberg) and daughter, a pair of slacker, would-be con artist brothers, a man trying to take part in the race without his family finding out, an Italian narcoleptic (Atkinson), and an aspiring lawyer (Meyer).

With more than a hint of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, this one is best described as mindless fun. Very mindless in fact, but fun nevertheless... Director Zucker's cinematic reputation was made in the years of Airplane and Top Secret, and there's nothing here to challenge the comedic heights of those classics, but it's a diverting enough couple of hours.

Structurally, the film is basically a series of set pieces hung around the thinnest of premises, but most of them are funny enough to be self-sustaining. Among the best are the hot air balloon sequence, Whoopi Goldberg in an attempt to braek the land speed record, a brilliant sequence with Meyer and his pilot in her helicopter, flying over her cheating boyfriend, and best of all an attempt to disable the radar dish at Las Vegas airport. Among the weaker elements are everything involving Atkinson, and most of the sequences focusing on the family led by Jon Lovitz, which include an ongoing chain of events involving neo-Nazis that fall entirely flat.

Lacking a plot as such, there's little room for the generally engaging cast (Atkinson and Lovitz excepted) to engage in anything so challenging as characterisation, so they primarily get by on the quality of their slapstick. For some (Goldberg, Gooding, Green and Vince Vieluf), this works better than others, but no one is given short shrift, and the audience should always find two or three racers to sympathise with. One or two points cause one to scratch one's head - the whole existence of Atkinson's character, who might have worked better with another actor in the role but here just looks like a weird Mr Bean clone, for instance, or the decision to give Cleese a set of unconvincing false teeth.

Apart from an unnecessarily sentimental ending, and the fact that anyone looking for intellectual stimulation should clearly be looking elsewhere, for an entertaining night at the cinema, with some truly laugh-out-loud moments, you could do a lot worse than checking out Rat Race.