T would be nice to watch a comedy that attempts to take a different approach other than the current trend of shock humor, the kind that really shows no talent or thought. It’s been too long since there actually been a script that’s shown some talent in writing jokes instead of these stupid teen comedies that keep repeating the same jokes or ridiculous situations. This fact alone makes comedy one of my least favorite genres anymore because they lack any kind of genuine laughter.
Rat Race come along with a numerous cast that contains several quality actors that should provide huge amounts of laughs. But instead falls flat on there faces due to the ludricous situations that are created because the production thought these things were funny but really aren’t. I guess hollywood believes audiences love comedies that only give you 5 minutes of combined laughter out of 90 min movies.
PLOT
I’m sure someone hurt there head thinking this one up because it’s so complicated. The story centers around eight people that were chosen at random using special gold coins won from Vegas slot machines to enter into a racing contest for 2 million dollars that was set by a casino owner Each contestant was given a key to unlock a locker at a train station 500 miles away containing the money and the first one there wins. Wait, I have to contain my excitement within before I move on.
CHARACTERS
There’s a wide variety of different personalities here to chose, the movie just jumps from one character to the other charting there progress and the insane event that they run into. To make this less painful, here’s a list
-Cuba Gooding Jr. as a NFL referee who screws up badly on National TV
-Whoopi Goldberg as a mother that finds her long lost daughter
-Rowan Atkinson as a Narcoleptic Italian man who has no clue
-Seth Green and Vince Vieluf as stupid con artist brothers looking for a quick buck
Breckin Meyer and Amy Smart(same duo from Road Trip) as a political average joe and a helicopter pilot.
-Jom Lovitz and Kathy Najimy as a family who’s running gag is completely unfunny.
-John Cleese as the eccentric casino owner who loves making money.
One would think with all these people there would be constant laughter all the way around but there’s really only 2 of these little stories that are even remotely funny. Rowan Atkinson and Seth Green provides some of the amusing physical humor from Rowan’s facial expressions to Green’s attempt to sabotage a air control tower. The best in saved for Cleese and his millionaire friends betting on who will win as well other bets on random things that was definitely more amusing then watching anything else.
Everyone else in the movie is a complete waste of time because most of there bits are used just to fill space. For instance Whoopi Goldberg meets up with her long lost daughter with about as much excitement as a piece of dirt on the wall. They are brought together from the race and they really don’t really have any kind of dialogue with one another. Why even bother having this lost daughter subplot if your not going to use it. I believe there are certain things that should not be done in comedies or anything else for that matter.
An example of this is the running gag of Jon Lovitz character and there family and the event of them stealing Hitler’s personal car. This whole sequence leads to a WWII reunion and it one of the worst and unfunny things I have ever seen on screen. Lovitz should be embarrassed for willingly performing this kind of display. This topic should be saved for documentaries so there’s actually a purpose in it, learning from our history because that’s only thing it deserves and this type of subject will never be funny
PROBLEMS
I understand this is probably one of the hardest genres of movies to make and even more difficult to act in because the writing and timing are so important. But how hard is it to write more than 5 to 10 minutes of laughter in a movie that lasts for 90 minutes. Why waste the audiences time if you can’t even entertain them with more than a handful of laughs. Everyone please raise your hands if you think animal torture is a great source of comedy.
Enough with the cows already, It really wasn’t funny the first time and now they keep doing it in different movies. The cast seems to really attempt to make something happen for this movie but then again you can’t take a piece of paper and turn it into a bar of gold. As I said most of the performances were stale at best and it didn’t help there weren’t funny sequences. But then again the ending is one of the worst and painfully long and drawn out sequences that I ever sat through.
And the great thing is it has a nice happy moral justification to it that wants you to feel all warm and fuzzy inside but it’s something that doesn’t fit at all with this type of movie and comes completely out of nowhere. And of course what movie wouldn’t be great if there wasn’t a cameo by Smashmouth themselves playing, you guessed it All Star. Now this was fine when it was used in Mystery Men but if I hear this song played again for any movie I’m going to scream and start pulling out the stadium seating.
CONCLUSIONS
You can say I pretty much lost my faith in comedies after sitting through Say it isn’t so, What’s the worst that could happen, as well as this one. I didn’t realize it was such a hard concept to produce more than a few laughs at a time but if your someone who just looks only for few laughs, most being empty , then look no further then here. I’m not going to hold my breathe in finding a great comedy script anytime soon and it just proves it after seeing this