Rat Race
One of the latest ZAZ-like films, made by the last Z of the bunch. This is a less risqué version of The Cannonball Run, with less crazy casting. Amy Smart as the helicopter pilot is as much as they go.
Evildoer idle rich guys pick people at random in a casino, tell them 2 million bucks are 500 miles away, and off they go. The chief casino boss is John Cleese on autopilot. It’s a wacky race!
There’s Whoopi Goldberg, as the ditzy middle age woman who just met her daughter she abandoned 30 years ago. Turns out she’s the CEO of a massive cosmetics company having an IPO, and she’s got major anger issues.
There’s Jon Lovitz as the family man, who wanted to just wanted to get away from his relatives and gamble. They are Jewish, so all their gags involve Klaus Barbie, Hitler’s Mercedes, and left-wing lesbian biker gangs.
There’s Cuba Gooding Jr. as a gridiron referee who fucked up, and just wants to lay low, but always gets dragged into the wildest hijinks.
There’s Seth Green and his brother, the younger partners for life. They are schemers, always searching for a quick buck, always looking for an angle. Their hijinks are mostly slapstick.
There’s the straight arrow dude, who was in Vegas for a bachelor party and wants to get back to his world, but then he meets Amy Smart the helicopter pilot and his life changes. She finds her boyfriend cheating on her and chases him around, and jumps into the arms of the first rebound relationship she has.
Finally, as the wildcard, there’s Rowan Atkinson as Enrico the Italian stereotype, Mamma Mia! He doesn’t even have a backstory, it’s just Italiano Mistero Bean.
They got to pick the pieces, go to the races. No matter the hijinks, they all arrive at the same time, but the wildcard gets there just a tiny bit faster. Doesn’t matter, because a stripper will steal the money, then through zany schemes, they burst into a Smash Mouth concert for starving children and just give all their money away, plus guilt John Cleese and his cronies to do that too.
Cue All Star song, the cast crowdsurfs, roll credits.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.