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Rating:
What I am about to review is neither a masterpiece of world cinematography, nor a great blockbuster, let alone a film adaptation of major historical events. "Rat Race" is a comedic, frivolous American blockbuster, funny and irreverent, partly due to the notable group of film stars, such as Whoopi Goldberg, Rowan Atkinson, and Kathy Bates, and also due to the multiplication of the humorous charge due to the adventures of the individual "contestants."
Donald Sinclair, an eccentric and wealthy casino owner in Las Vegas, decides to set up, along with other pompous friends, a sort of "game" to include common mortals, mediocre, vicious, devoid of great wealth, bored, a sample of stereotypes of today's American society. The game, or rather, the competition, consists of reaching Silver City by any means, a place where two million dollars in large bills are kept at the train station. The participants, comparable to puppets placed in their individual theater, are selected without particularly meritocratic criteria: whoever, using the slot machines at the casino, wins a bizarre token, will be fully entitled to compete for the stakes.
The competing "pawns" represent 100% the average American: there are the little rascals Duan and Blaine Cody, a bastardized version of Laurel and Hardy (one strict and rational, the other silly and incapable), the narcoleptic Henry McCollions - Enrico Pollini in the original version - (Rowan Atkinson), the precise, honest, and modest lawyer (at least in appearance) Nick Shaffer, accompanied during the "marathon" by the zany helicopter pilot Tracy Faucet, and the credulous and good-natured lady Vera Baker (Whoopi Goldberg) who, at the said Casino, is about to meet for the first time in her life her entrepreneurial daughter Merrill Jennings, the result of a youthful oversight. Also participating is the failed referee, Owen Templeton, who ended (before it started) a football match because he wasn't sure of the coin toss outcome used for the first team's selection to attack, as well as the ramshackle family of Randy Pear, a Jew oppressed by his incorruptible wife and two annoying brats.
Once arrived together in Silver City after a marvelous series of adventures, the characters let the loot slip away, which, "flying" (!!!), lands on the stage of a charity concert animated by the Smash Mouth. In front of children to help, the two million dollars are donated, along with a large part of Donald Sinclair's private wealth, a donation announced live by the lawyer Shaffer as revenge for having abused the good faith of these "racers."
Simple, without too many frills and too many expectations, the film fully showcases American humor technique, quirky, pleasant, at times grotesque (never as much as our cinepanettoni, however). It intends to focus on the heart of the film, in the midst of the individual messes created by the contestants, almost to emphasize how the lust for money leads to such chaos: hilarious are the attempts to mislead others carried out by the Cody brothers, even though the targets of their innumerable messes are -unintentionally- themselves (they inadvertently enter a Monster Truck circuit, get into a brawl with various cattle in a prairie), the misfortunes of the referee Templeton who, abandoned in the middle of the desert by a taxi driver who recognized him, tries to reach Silver City by posing as the driver of a bus full of scary ladies headed to the I Love Lucy convention in Santa Fe, as well as the misadventures of the Pear family, who stopped at a Klaus Barbie Museum, and decided to loot Hitler’s tourist car once they found out that the wheels of their van were deflated by the Cody brothers. Worth mentioning is the presence of Kathy Bates as a strange squirrel vendor and deceiver of Vera and her daughter Merrill.
The message of the film is almost banal: happiness is not directly proportional to the amount of money, the dishonest rich man who has fun at the beginning and is ultimately humiliated... in short, a semi-predictable moral that marries the positive charge of ridiculous characters, stereotyped with macroscopic vices, a comedic tool, perhaps overused, but still always effective and relevant.
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