RAT RACE

Review by Richard Kuipers:
It takes time to get going and ends with a thud but there's plenty of fun between the bookends of Jerry Zucker's ramshackle comedy. A reworking of Stanley Kramer's 1963 all-star chase favourite It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World (itself an homage to such films of the 20s and 30s), this marks a welcome return to pure slapstick. It's so long since anyone's done it, this almost feels new. Don't expect big laughs straight-up because Zucker and screenwriter Andy Breckman (of Saturday Night Live) deliberately keep things more or less straight as we meet the losers given a shot at outrageous fortune. Among the players are family man/pokie addict Jon Lovitz, reunited mother-daughter team Whoopi Goldberg and Lanai Chapman, loveable Italian narcoleptic Rowan Atkinson, straight-laced lawyer Breckin Meyer and disgraced football referee Cuba Gooding Jr. Once Cleese bares his capped teeth (Wayne Newton would be proud) and fires the starting pistol the fun begins and keeps going for a good hour or more, with verbal and visual gags that evolve and pay off handsomely as the race hots up. Keep your eye on the runaway hot air balloon and you'll see what I mean. There's also no-one better at handling Nazi humour than Jewish directors. Zucker does it beautifully as Lovitz and family wind up stealing Hitler's staff car from a museum and admiring its accessories. For a film made with only belly laughs in mind it's remarkable how it inspires a strangely uplifiting sense of humanity. That's not very important though - what we're here for is the sight of Cuba Gooding Jr stranded half naked in the desert and Whoopi Goldberg piloting a rocket car at 800 mph. Now that's funny. Pity about the 'right on' ending. A reminder that this is the correct new millenium and not the carefree 60s.