RAT RACE []
Cheesy comic scramble with second-tier stars. Running time: 112 minutes. Rated PG-13 (vulgar humor). At the E Walk, Coronet, Battery Park City, others.
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THERE are a few good belly laughs in this shameless ripoff of the all-star “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World” – unfortunately, they’re almost all in the coming-attractions trailer.
The 1963 original packed in comedy legends like Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Jonathan Winters, Dick Shawn, Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis, Peter Falk and Mickey Rooney – and still managed to be only sporadically amusing.
This, uh, homage – produced on a smaller scale and budget (allowing for inflation) with Canadian locations unconvincingly impersonating the American Southwest – boasts distinctly second-tier talents like Cuba Gooding Jr., Whoopi Goldberg, Rowan Atkinson and Breckin Meyer.
So it’s not surprising that the batting average is lower still, even with a veteran comedy director like Jerry Zucker (“Airplane!” and the “Naked Gun” movies) instead of earnest Stanley Kramer, who helmed “Mad World.”
Zucker, who’s been dabbling in tearjerkers like “Ghost” for the past decade, is a little rusty.
You can see the elaborate gags and stunts – including flying cows, comic Nazis and a bus full of Lucille Ball impersonators, courtesy of “Saturday Night Live” writer Andy Breckman – coming a mile away, and they tend to stick around long after they stop being funny.
In what seems like a second-tier reality-TV show, an eccentric Las Vegas casino owner (John Cleese), for the benefit of his bettors, sets up a scramble for $2 million in cash stashed in a locker in a New Mexico train station.
There are no rules, so the hapless contestants – including Seth Green and Vince Vieluf as a pair of moronic, would-be con artists – are free to sabotage one another, one another’s cars and even the local airport’s traffic-control system.
Brit comic Atkinson is amusing, at first, as a narcoleptic Italian who teams up with an ambulance driver (Wayne Knight) transporting a heart for transplant, but the shtick quickly wears thin.
Meyer, as a strait-laced lawyer, enlists the help of a manic helicopter pilot (Amy Smart) who decides to buzz a boyfriend she catches in the pool with a neighbor – but the bit never gets airborne.
The funniest sequence involves family-man contestant Jon Lovitz, who’s forced to take along wife Kathy Najimy and the brats – and their stop at a Barbie museum that turns out to have nothing to do with the ubiquitous doll.
Dave Thomas isn’t bad, either, as Cleese’s shifty lawyer – but mostly “Rat Race” is a cheesy affair with no big winners.
Especially the audience.