Rat Race - the sheer madness

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Movie
German title Rat Race - the sheer madness
Original title Rat Race
Country of production United States , Canada
original language English
Publishing year 2001
length 107 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
JMK 6
Rod
Director Jerry Sugar
script Andy Breckman
production Sean Daniel ,
Janet Zucker ,
Jerry Zucker
music John Powell
camera Thomas E. Ackerman
cut Tom Lewis
occupation

Rat Race - The Rat Race ( Rat Race ) is an American-Canadian ensemble - comedy of Jerry Zucker from the year 2001 . The film premiered on July 30, 2001 in the United States. In Germany it was published on August 29, 2002, in Austria the following day.

action

The eccentric millionaire Donald P. Sinclair owns a casino in Las Vegas . For an exclusive bet between very rich top players, he lets a group of randomly selected casino guests take part in a crazy race. A locker in Silver City , New Mexico , holds $ 2 million for the group who arrives first.

The colorfully mixed troop sets out with various means. Sometimes they are so clumsy that they are involved in a wide variety of situations:

  • The narcoleptic Enrico Pollini is picked up by a courier who is supposed to bring a heart transplant to El Paso . Curiously, they take it out of the cool box on the way. It falls out of the car window and is retrieved by a stray dog. The courier now wants to kill Enrico in order to get a fresh heart. At the last second, Enrico jumps onto a passing train.
  • The Pear family pauses at the Barbie Museum on the way. However, it is not the Barbie doll , but SS - war criminal Klaus Barbie dedicated. To escape, the family had to steal Hitler's traveling car, which was one of the exhibits. So they end up accidentally in the midst of a gathering of American veterans of the Second World War , who regard this as a very bad joke. Randall Pear finally drugged his family, who are tired of it. With the help of a trucker, they eventually reach their destination.
  • Goofy brothers Duane and Blaine Cody fall from one misfortune to the next, preventing a plane from even taking off from the airport by destroying a facility until they finally try to get ahead with a hot air balloon . A cow gets caught in the tether of the balloon basket.
  • Vera Baker has just found her daughter Merrill after many years when she steers into the racing adventure. At a crazy trader who sells live squirrels, they ask for directions. Because they don't want to buy a squirrel from her, she lures the two women into a diabolical trap. Only with the help of a high-speed racing car, which they steal while attempting a record in the desert, can they get out of their hopeless situation. The two finally reach Silver City in a bus to a psychiatric hospital.
  • The Football Referee Owen Templeton tries to reach by taxi its target. Unfortunately the taxi driver recognizes him, who recently lost a lot of money due to a wrong decision by Owen, and drops him off in the middle of the desert. After an exhausting forced march he encounters a group of screaming I Love Lucy - Fans and serves on as a bus driver. When he broke down, Lucy fans followed him after he confessed to them that he was not a bus driver. In the end, he reaches the goal with a horse.
  • The young lawyer Nick, who actually didn't want to take part in the race, hires the pretty helicopter pilot Tracy after the two brothers prevented a plane from taking off at all, and so quickly gains a head start because helicopters are still allowed to take off and thus sees the race as easy to win. Unfortunately, during the flight, she watches her friend from the air as he is cheating on her with a playmate in the pool. Furious with jealousy, she pursues the unfaithful lover and has to make an emergency landing in the helicopter. Nick has now fallen in love with her and together they continue the race.

The participants eventually all reach Silver City at the same time. Enrico, who was the first to reach the locker, falls asleep before he can take the money. When the other participants open the locker, they realize that the money has meanwhile been stolen by Sinclair's attorney Harold Grisham. On the hunt for the stolen money, which flies away in the two brothers' hot air balloon, they land on a stage where the band Smash Mouth is starting a benefit concert for homeless children. Finally, they donate the $ 2 million. In the end, Donald Sinclair and his competitors are forced to grind their teeth to double the donations of the evening out of their own pocket, which at the end of the film was over 19 million.

reception

Rat Race received mixed reviews. On Metacritic , the comedy received a 52 percent rating from 26 reviews, of which 13 were positive and 7 were negative. At Rotten Tomatoes review was carried out at 44 percent based on 126 reviews, of which 55 are positive and considered negative 71; an average of 4.9 out of 10 points was awarded to the film. Summing up the review, Rat Race jumps from one visual gag to the next, of which only a handful are really funny. ("Rat Race moves from one sight gag to another, but only a handful of them are genuinely funny.")

The lexicon of international films sees "a turbulent comedy that does not find a closed form, but with all its closeness to caricature gives its characters endearing features."

For Mick LaSalle ( San Francisco Chronicle ) the comedy is in the genre tradition A totally, totally crazy world from 1963. With its warm kind of anarchy Rat Race is the funniest film since South Park: The movie two years earlier.

Rat Race draws its humor not only from films like a totally, totally crazy world but also from the accidents, car chases and screams of the silent movie era, so Kenneth Turan in August 2001 in the Los Angeles Times . The plot remains, however, only reason to push the action, which drifted partly into a feverish. The cast was successful right down to the supporting roles, but Rowan Atkinson's brilliant play deserves special mention.

Desson Thomson wrote in the Washington Post that the comedy won't be considered one of the better Sugar movies, but it made it funnier than expected.

Robert Wilonsky (New Times LA) sees Rat Race as a stupid film with rare - perhaps only coincidental - clever moments that would only show even more how banal the film is.

Awards

Glenn J. Smith was nominated for the 2002 World Stunt Award for chasing a helicopter through traffic .

References to other films

The plot of the film, albeit with a different motivation, essentially follows the film A total, total crazy world from 1963.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Age rating for Rat Race - Der nackte Wahnsinn . Youth Media Commission .
  2. ↑ Rat Race - The naked madness at Metacritic (English)
  3. ↑ Rat Race - The Naked Madness at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
  4. ^ Rat Race - The sheer madness. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  5. ↑ Mick LaSalle: 'Rat Race' is pure escapism. Chase film does the genre proud. In: San Francisco Chronicle . January 18, 2002, accessed December 7, 2015 .
  6. ↑ Kenneth Turan: Old-Fashioned Gags Drive Frantic 'Rat Race'. In: Los Angeles Times . August 17, 2001, accessed December 7, 2015 .
  7. ^ Desson Thomson: Review Rat Race. (No longer available online.) In: The Washington Post . August 16, 2001, formerly in the original ; accessed on December 7, 2015 (English, quotation from Metacritic entry): "Even though this will not go down as a great Zucker comedy, he has made Rat Race funnier than it could reasonably hope to be."
  8. ↑ Robert Wilonsky: Race Baiting. In: New Times LA. August 16, 2001, archived from the original on November 1, 2001 ; accessed on December 7, 2015 .