Troubles on the road to riches

RAT RACE X Cert 12, 112 mins (POOR)

WHY does the world hate us, Americans ask. If they can stand it, they'll find the answer in Rat Race. A bunch of the ugliest, most vulgar and avaricious Las Vegas vacationers you could imagine get an invitation from a gambling tycoon (John Cleese in funny teeth), the sort of guy who'll send his executive jet into a roll so as to bet on who'll be sick first. A multimillion-dollar bag of loot awaits the first to open a railroad locker in Silver City hundreds of miles away.

The pack stampedes towards it by all foul means and eccentric conveyances - including a hot-air balloon that's picked up a grazing steer, and a Mercedes that belonged to Adolf Hitler.

Director Stanley Kramer copped it way back in 1963 for exalting the money ethic as an American virtue when he made It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; but his grabathon (192 minutes long) now seems a pantheon of Anglo-American comedy talents (Sid Caesar, Buster Keaton, Phil Silvers, Jerry Lewis, Terry-Thomas) compared with Jerry Zucker's semi-remake that convokes (in addition to Cleese) Rowan Atkinson, Whoopi Goldberg, Cuba Gooding Jnr and others wholly unknown to me (Kathy Najimy?

Jon Lovitz? Breckin Meyer?), and long may they stay that way.

Eyeballs strain, faces contort, voices bellow, legs flail: I've never seen so much anatomy deputising for humour. The Jewish family has the best gag - after all, quantity at some point has to turn into quality - when they detour off the trail to riches to visit the "Barbie Museum", and find it's a proto-Nazi shrine to Klaus Barbie, Nazi butcher of Lyons. After that, Cuba Gooding Jnr, finding himself driving a bus laden to the loo with I Love Lucy lookalikes, seems too refined.

Worst offender of all, I am not surprised to say, is Rowan Atkinson, who does the coarsest caricature possible of Roberto Benigni's twittering Italian stereotype, and does it in every scene save the ones in which his character, a narcoleptic, closes his eyes and goes to sleep. (At those moments, he's bearable). His finale is being mistaken for a paedophile when he reaches into a baby's nappy to retrieve the key to his riches.

In Kramer's film, Spencer Tracy remained the sole uncorrupted character in order to redeem the view of America as a money-mad society. In Zucker's updated version, the entire cast of lucre louts turns sentimental and contribute its millions to charity.

The country's obviously gone soft.

Copyright 2002
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