Review of Rat Race (2001) by Paul Z — 30 Apr 2009

What baffles me is not that I laughed so hard at some junctures of this movie, but how ugly the head is that can occasionally rear from a movie that consciously suppresses the height of its aim for brainless, commercially whorish averageness. There is no argument against the certainty that this $50 million road movie is vastly enjoyable for minutes at a time, most of those minutes occupied by John Cleese, but it is, just as often, painfully empty save for vast amounts of corny contrivance, which consists of nearly the entire time Amy Smart and Breckin Meyer are on screen.

As for Andy Breckman's script, which involves a group of arbitrarily hand-picked yet somehow pathologically diverse idiots scrambling through the desert in search of riches, it is essentially icing with no cake, the icing being a relentlessly frantic succession of wild, contrived coincidences and strained pratfalls and stunts. There's an overwhelming amount of yelling and shouting in Rat Race, which is key to understanding the degree of superficiality mustered by Breckman and often superior director Jerry Zucker to hold our attention.

You are preaching to the converted if you tell me to understand that this is slapstick and that only humorless types insist that movies adhere to a certain internal logic, but how exactly does a football referee blow a coin toss to the extent it costs one team the game? What about continuity at any point in this entire movie? Rat Race is not a movie for people who ask questions like these. That's a harsh judgment, in all fairness the filmmakers were probably trying to make a genuinely entertaining light diversion, but the fact is the resultant film is excruciatingly successful in said attempt.