Film's antics fail to impress
 By
Jeremy Rea
Staff Writer
What do you do if you find yourself presented with
a bevy of celebrities, a bunch of cars, the rights to "Who Let the Dogs
Out," a vague outline of a script and a free Saturday afternoon? If
you're Jerry Zucker, you throw it all into a rarely funny but passionately
bland chase comedy and call it "Rat Race."
Intended as either an homage to "It's a Mad Mad
Mad Mad World," or more accurately, a cheap rip-off of that film, "Rat
Race" pits several Las Vegas tourists against one another in a race
to reach a locker containing $2 million.
The contestants hail from various backgrounds,
from an unfunny and uncharismatic football referee (Cuba Gooding, Jr.)
to an unfunny and uncharismatic Semitic family man (Jon Lovitz). Their
progress is monitored by an eccentric casino owner (John Cleese), who
is taking bets on the outcome from high-stakes gamblers.
Naturally, antics ensue, dealing almost exclusively
with cars running off roads and characters screaming frantically. Some
scenes are painfully difficult to watch, while some of the funnier episodes
(like a cow dangling from a hot air balloon) are less painful to watch.
All of this, of course, is merely a front for two
hours of cameos and kooky car crashes. So it's unfortunate that the
best cameos that could be dug up were Dean Cain and Paul Rodriguez and
the kookiest car crash involves Hitler's Mercedes.
With the exception of one rather disturbing scene
about the definition of "prairie dogging," the humor is inoffensive
to the point of annoyance, yet the movie still manages to give the impression
it's trying desperately to be cool.
As I mentioned before, it does contain the once
ubiquitous "Who Let the Dogs Out" and allows Smash Mouth 20 minutes
on camera, presumably because their music is popular with the hep kids.
"Rat Race" is the movie your dad would make if
he wanted you to still think he was still cool. At least "Cannonball
Run" had Burt Reynolds.
|
