Rat Race
By Danny Sarnowski

Ah, Rat Race. As I walked into the theater to see Rat Race, the new comedy from Jerry Zucker (one of the masterminds behind Airplane!, Top Secret, and the Naked Gun movies), my mind was reeling. What would I title the review? “Rat Droppings?” “I would have preferred to eat a rat than see this movie?” My mind was afire with the seemingly limitless possibilities that lay before me to make fun of this movie. Though the film boasted an impressive cast of comedic actors, and a director with an impressive resume, I was pretty sure it was going to be awful. I was fairly positive I was going to leave the theater fuming over the fact that I just wasted $8, and nursing a nasty stomachache to boot. Well, I was half right. My stomach did ache as I left the theater. It hurt from laughing almost constantly for two hours.

Don’t get me wrong, Rat Race is no Airplane! or Top Secret. It isn’t Dr. Strangelove. But in a season filled with lame comedies like Scary Movie 2, America’s Sweethearts, Dr. Doolittle 2, and Evolution, it sure seems like it. Rat Race succeeds because it doesn’t ask the audience for much of anything. It doesn’t ask us to invest any emotions into paper-thin characters. It never asks us to believe in the “only-in-a-movie” reality the characters inhabit. All it does ask is that we shut up, sit down, and hold on.

The movie starts off slowly, introducing us to the wacky cast of characters we’ll be rooting for. We meet the beleaguered family man (Jon Lovitz), the idiot brothers (Seth Green and Vince Vieluf), the conservative, law-abiding citizen (Breckin Meyer), and the goofy, foreign narcoleptic (Rowan Atkinson) to name a few. Each of these people is invited to a secret meeting with an eccentric millionaire played by John Cleese who sports the creepiest set of false teeth I have ever seen on film. Cleese explains to them that they each have a chance to win $2 million that is stashed in a locker in a small New Mexico town. All they have to do is be the first one to get there and nab the cash. The characters react to this with a general sense of mistrust and disbelief. They all agree that they are not going for the money. But, as soon as one person opts to take the stairs rather than the elevator, they all make a mad dash for it and the race is on.

From here, the movie takes these characters on the weirdest, wildest, most outrageous journey you could imagine. Characters are driving along and suddenly find themselves in the middle of a monster truck rally or on a bus loaded with Lucille Ball look-alikes. One minute they are driving Hitler’s car and the next looking for a donor heart that accidentally got thrown out a window into the waiting jaws of a stray dog. The movie doesn’t pull any punches. It pokes fun at gamblers, the mentally ill, nazis, narcoleptics, and medical professionals. It’s that kind of movie. You sit there, mind racing, struggling to keep up with the ridiculous antics of the greedy, loathsome characters on the screen. And you have a great time. It’s a great, stupid, silly, ludicrous movie. But one I would gladly see again.

7 February 2002