What would you do for a million dollars? How about 2 million? The ensemble comedic cast in Jerry Zucker's Rat Race doesn't have to answer that question until they are randomly picked by eccentric millionaire and owner of the Venetian casino in Las Vegas, Donald Sinclair, to be the contestants in a rat race, first one to a random gold rush town in New Mexico wins 2 million dollars.
This is slapstick humor at its finest. The cast, though all talented on their own, come together to create absolute hilarity as they rush about the American southwest to destroy the competition--eachother.
But the casino owner is not simply altruistic or even that eccentric for that matter. He wants to give his higher paying clientele something new to gamble with. Something more exciting than black jack--human subjects that can lie, steal, cheat and outwit one another, in a horse race with intellect. Some of the funniest moments come in between race scenes when the millionaires gather to bet on everything from how long the hotel maids can hang from a curtain rod to who will be the first to throw up in the Lear jet to how much a hooker will charge for some very strange sexual acts.
The movie features such modern comedic geniuses as John Lovitz playing a devout Jew who finds himself and his family traveling in Hitler's reconditioned automobile to the Clause Barbie, renowned Nazi museum, Rowan Atkinson in a speaking role (a diversion from Mr. Bean) as an Italian tourist, Seth Greene as a greedy orphan and Cuba Gooding Junior as the referee who botched the Super Bowl.
The physical comedy is well-staged and the verbal comedy well-layered creating scene upon scene of laughs.
The writing is intelligent and witty, something not often encountered in slapstick movies, but found throughout this film.
This is classic Zucker style, reminiscent of The Naked Gun and Airplane. With a cast like this, a great script and eventually a bus full of I Love Lucy impersonators, the movie can not go wrong.
