Good Old-Fashioned Lunacy

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

He owns a casino. He's rich. He's nutsy. Donald Sinclair (John Cleese) is Howard Hughes with a cheerfully sadistic attitude. He puts $2 million in a duffel bag 700 miles from Las Vegas and sets six desperate, disparate groups in pursuit of the swag--winner take all. Meanwhile, to enrich himself further, he has a roomful of rich guys betting on the outcome.

You might say Rat Race is an updated variant of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, except that the new film was directed by a guy who actually has a sense of humor (Jerry Zucker) and written by a funny guy named Andy Breckman.

The big idea here is big scale. In olden times you gave Charlie Chaplin a pair of roller skates, or Laurel and Hardy a decrepit flivver, and they would make some kind of magic with these severely limited means. In the new century, it doesn't take a village to make us laugh, but it does sometimes require overturning a bus (piloted by Cuba Gooding Jr. as a disgraced football official and jammed with Lucy impersonators on their way to a convention), crashing a helicopter or accidentally setting a land speed record in a rocket car driven by Whoopi Goldberg and Lanai Chapman.

Zucker handles all this with a nice, unforced aplomb. And come to think of it, with a nice eye for smaller-scaled idiocies as well. There is, for example, Kathy Bates selling squirrels by the roadside and exacting a terrible revenge on non-buyers. Then there's the Barbie Museum. That would be a roadside attraction devoted not to the immortal doll but to the vicious Nazi Klaus Barbie. Not to worry, though, the befuddled Jewish family (with Jon Lovitz as its addled patriarch and Kathy Najimy his bemused wife) makes its escape in style--in Hitler's onetime touring car. Best of all, there's Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Pollini, a good-natured Italian immigrant struggling hilariously with his nonnative language and with the narcolepsy that overtakes him at crucial moments. He's what Roberto Benigni would be if he knew how to play for laughs instead of killing for them.

One doesn't want to go all cosmic about an agreeably funny, well-made comedy designed for nothing grander than relief from the August heat. But still, one can't help noticing that what energy is left in mainstream American moviemaking these days is concentrated in lowball comedy. Action movies like The Score are tired and talky. Romantic comedy like America's Sweethearts is as flat as yesterday's bottled water. And judging by The Others, even ghosts are turning into gormless dinner guests who have outstayed their welcome. Only the very occasional nut case, like Rat Race, has conviction and divinely orchestrated lunacy. This may (or may not) say something about the pathology of our everyday life. But the faith that is driving the Rat Race characters through their uncharitable activities is pure greed and pure solipsism.

Not that Rat Race avoids piety entirely. It ends with a near orgy of unpersuasive show-biz sentimentality. But up till then it's a fine madness, full of jaunty desperation, survivable disasters and the kind of ferocious concentration on a really stupid idea that once propelled Wile E. Coyote through--come to think of it--a similarly bleak and comically perilous American landscape.

--By Richard Schickel