Movie Scene
'Rat Race' is cheesy summer fare

By Marshall Fine
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News

RAT RACE (Rated PG-13 for profanity, partial nudity, violence, adult themes) Two stars. A broad slapstick comedy aimed squarely at the 13-year-old sensibility. It's the epitome of the disposable summer comedy. Starring Jon Lovitz, Rowan Atkinson, Whoopi Goldberg, Cuba Gooding Jr. Directed by Jerry Zucker. Paramount Pictures. 103 minutes.

This is slapstick on an incredibly broad scale — though not quite as broad as Stanley Kramer's "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," which it works hard to emulate. With its diverse cast and shtick-heavy format, this comedy is a throwback to the violent slapstick of the 1930s and '40s, infused with 21st-century gross-out impulses.

I will admit to laughing very hard a couple of times during "Rat Race," mostly at sequences involving Rowan Atkinson, Wayne Knight and a heart on its way to a transplant. My hunch is that this movie will work better with younger audiences than with adults.

Directed by comedy veteran Jerry Zucker, the film gathers a disparate group at a Las Vegas hotel: the yuppie lawyer (Breckin Meyer); an achiever daughter (Lanai Chapman) and her long-lost mother (Whoopi Goldberg); a disgraced football referee (Cuba Gooding Jr.); a hen-pecked family man on vacation (Jon Lovitz); a clueless Italian tourist (Rowan Atkinson); and a pair of sibling hoodlums (Seth Green and Vince Vieluf).

They are summoned to a casino-hotel where billionaire Donald Sinclair (John Cleese) tells them they've been chosen to play a game. He gives them identical keys and tells them they open the same locker – filled with $2 million – in a bus station in rural New Mexico. The first one there gets to keep the cash.

Each key carries a transmitter so Sinclair can track their whereabouts. The reason becomes clearer after they take off, when Sinclair brings in an elite pool of gamblers, who have taken odds on the race.

There are large comedy set-pieces involving hot-air balloons and cows, a bus full of Lucille Ball impersonators and a family stop at a museum they mistakenly believe is devoted to Mattel's Barbie. Instead, it turns out to be dedicated to the memory of Nazi Klaus Barbie and is run by skinheads.

That's one of the few adult jokes in the film and one likely to fly right over the heads of the target demographic. It's also one of the more outrageously funny bits in the movie. This film is funniest when it is in the worst taste — and merely dumb the rest of the time.

"Rat Race" is the movie with the jokes the kids will be retelling at day camp next week and will have forgotten by the time school starts. It is the epitome of the disposable summer comedy.

Rated PG-13 for profanity, partial nudity, violence, and adult themes.

Marshall Fine reviews film for The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News and Gannett News Service.