Rat Race (film)

Rat Race
DVD cover
Directed by	Jerry Zucker
Written by	Andy Breckman
Produced by	Jerry Zucker Jay Firestone
Starring	John Cleese Rowan Atkinson Cuba Gooding, Jr. Whoopi Goldberg Jon Lovitz Seth Green Kathy Najimy Breckin Meyer Amy Smart Vince Vieluf Lanai Chapman Kathy Bates Paul Rodriguez Wayne Knight Dave Thomas Brody Smith Silas Weir Mitchell Jillian Marie Hubert Smash Mouth Rance Howard Colleen Camp Dean Cain Gene LeBell Gloria Allred Chris Myers Kevin Frazier
Music by	John Powell
Distributed by	Paramount
Release date	2001
Running time	112 min
Country	USA
Language	English

Rat Race is a 2001 comedy film (not to be confused with The Rat Race of 1960) directed by Jerry Zucker. It is an updated retelling of the 1963 film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The story is about six teams of people given a task of racing from a Las Vegas casino to a train station in New Mexico, where a storage locker contains a large amount of money; the first team to reach the locker wins and gets to keep the money.

Plot

Template:Spoiler Donald Sinclair, the multi-millionare owner of (The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino) in Las Vegas (played by John Cleese) devises a new game to entertain his wealthy patrons. Six special tokens are placed in the slot machines, and the winners of the tokens are gathered together and told that $2,000,000.00 in U.S. cash are hidden in a locker in a train station in Silver City, New Mexico. They are told they are in a race to get there first and claim the money. Each winner is given a key that will open the locker and they are sent on their way. Meanwhile, Sinclair's patrons place bets on who will end up with the money.

The film follows the contestants and the gamblers as they try to make their way to the locker. In the end, a misunderstanding results in the contestants giving the money to charity, and the gamblers are forced to match all money raised at a charity concert after Schaffer claims they have promised to do such a thing.

Major Characters

The Codys

The two inept Cody brothers, Duane (Seth Green) and Blaine (Vince Vieluf), are the first characters to find a token. Duane is the "sensible" one, while Blaine mumbles incoherently due to his swollen and badly infected tongue — the result of a botched self-piercing. They are at the casino to attempt to get rich by faking an injury and suing the casino. Instead they end up racing for $2,000,000. Having sabotaged the airport radar system to prevent anyone from flying to Silver City, they decide to split up and go separately to increase their chances of winning, so they try to get a second key made. They are not very bright, however, and the keymaker rips them off giving them two unmade keys while keeping the real one (they indiscreetly discussed their plan within earshot of the keymaker). The chase grows to a climax involving a hot air balloon and a cattle field.

Vera and Merrill

The second team is a mother-daughter team. Vera Baker (Whoopi Goldberg) went to the casino to meet her adult daughter, Merrill Jennings, (Lanai Chapman). Vera had not seen Merrill since she was put up for adoption as a baby, and despite tentative familial feelings they are essentially strangers. Although Merrill is sure that the race is a scam, her mother is excited by the idea and convinces her to join the race. While searching for the Interstate, they meet an insane woman (Kathy Bates) who is selling squirrels. When they persistently refuse to buy one, the Squirrel Lady gives them directions that send them off a cliff to a pile of cars and skeletons of the other people who did not buy squirrels. After wandering in the desert, they steal a rocket car set to break the ground speed record and when it runs out of fuel, they are mistakenly placed on a bus bound for a mental hospital.

Templeton

The much-hated NFL referee, Owen Templeton (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), is accused of making the "biggest bonehead call in the history of football" when the moment came to toss the coin for the kick-off. He is stranded in the desert by an irate cabbie(Paul Rodriguez) who lost a large sum of money due to Templeton's bad call in the football game. Owen comes across a small bus station and tricks one of the bus drivers into giving him his driver uniform and hat(saying his wife needs it because she is having a baby). However, the bus is full of Lucille Ball look-alikes on the way to an I Love Lucy convention. After a number of events on the bus(including a run in with a transgender Lucy), the bus gets a flat tire, and then flips over. Owen decides to just run away from them all and finds a horse to take him the rest of the way to Silver City.

The Pears

Randy Pear (Jon Lovitz), works at Home Depot. He is on a family vacation and, desperate to get rich so he doesn't have to work at Home Depot any more, he joins the race without telling his wife (Kathy Najimy) or his children why they are rushing across the country. He instead informs her that he has a job interview for filling ink pens, and ends up being forced to steal Adolf Hitler's car from a Nazi-theme museum about Klaus Barbie (Randy's daughter believes at first it is about the doll) after the Codys sabotage their car.

Pollini

The narcoleptic Italian tourist Enrico Pollini (Rowan Atkinson), despite being the most enthusiastic about the race, falls asleep for a few hours in the hotel lobby. When he wakes up, he gets a ride with an ambulance driver Zach (Wayne Knight), who is carting a human heart for a transplant. On the way he loses the heart, and hitches a ride from a train. In the Italian Dub, he is from London, and his name is "Enry McCoglions".

Schaffer

The final race member, Nick Schaffer (Breckin Meyer), is a strait-laced lawyer who at first declines to participate in the race, but re-thinks his position after he meets a smart, beautiful girl, Tracy Faucet (Amy Smart), who is flying a helicopter to New Mexico (Particularly since all planes have been grounded due to the interference of the Cody brothers, giving him and Tracy an advantage over the others as helicopters operate on a different system). While making a detour to drop in on Tracy's boyfriend, they spot his ex-girlfriend's car in the driveway and the two of them in an above-ground pool in the backyard. Tracy, with the fury of a woman scorned, collapses the pool and trashes her now ex-boyfriend's truck, then chases him out into the desert, pursuing him in the helicopter. When the helicopter (after many highly strenuous maneuvers) develops engine trouble, Nick and Tracy abandon it and take the abused-but-still-usable truck.

Sinclair

Donald Sinclair is the owner of the casino where the others meet and he creates the 2 Million Dollar Race to please his highroller gamblers. During the course of the movie, he runs various bets, including which gambler will throw up first on a turbulent airplane (see Trivia) Template:Endspoiler

Trivia

• While waiting for the winner, Sinclair's friends pass the time by making various different types of bets, such as which chocolate Sinclair's assistant will randomly choose, which hotel maid can hold onto the curtains longest without falling, and how much money will a prostitute ask to please a man with a very outrageous fetish. The prostitute scene is important later in the plot.

• The climactic railroad station scenes for Silver City, New Mexico were filmed at the restored train station at East Ely, Nevada, a popular tourist destination, as Silver City has no real train station.

• Donald Sinclair is the name of a deceased hotel owner from Torquay, England. Cleese has stated that Sinclair was the inspiration for his character of Basil Fawlty in Cleese's Fawlty Towers, who he met when he stayed at Gleneagles with the rest of the Monty Python cast. Coincidentally, Torquay is also where Fawlty Towers was set.

• The film grossed a fair $55.8 million at the US box office.

• The scene with the coin toss by Owen Templeton (Cuba Gooding, Jr.'s character) was filmed at McMahon Stadium in Calgary, Alberta, Canada

• Dean Cain plays Tracy's boyfriend Shawn Kent - Cain's most prolific role was Clark Kent in Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

External link

• Rat Race at The Internet Movie Database