Rat Race (2001)

We are living in dangerous times. Day by day, a loud-mouthed minority is sulking its way to centre stage and making nonsensical demands of the sensical majority. Comedy is a victim of modern 21st century culture. In recent years, it has been gradually distanced, as if by a disinterested spouse; increasingly held at arm's length. This last year or so has brought about an 'ethic' cleansing, if you like, and some invisible but all-powerful entity has dictated that much of the comedy we have known and loved over the years is no longer suitable for human consumption. So terrified are those at the top of hurting the feelings of some battered minority that no group or topic is fair game for a laugh. Top filmmakers have turned from comedy because of the overly-sensitive society we now face each day. The Zucker/Abrahams union have indirectly been all but exiled from the modern comedy cinema scene, and in retrospect, their first picture of the 21st century was already far tamer than their hits of the '80s. Perhaps I am some sort of cretin, but the sort of comedy that these guys made pretty much epitomises my taste in humour.

Loosely based on the '60s comedy It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Rat Race is an ensemble picture with a cast rivalling many that came before it. Donald Sinclair (John Cleese) is the rich tycoon at the head of the Venetian Hotel on the Las Vegas strip, whose days are passed by placing outlandish bets with a group of other, equally-rich tycoons. His latest whim involves randomly selecting a handful of the hotel's patrons, and setting them loose on a rule-free race to New Mexico to retrieve a duffel bag containing $2 million cash. Like the best of ensemble pictures, every party is equally important to the plot, overall outcome and comedy, so I will outline each of them. Vera (Whoopi Goldberg) has just reunited with her birth daughter Meryl (Lanai Chapman); Randy (Jon Lovitz) is on a long-awaited family vacation with his wife Bev (Kathy Najimy) and their two children; corporate robot Nick (Breckin Meyer) is too eager to leave a friend's bachelor party, and he meets spunky helicopter pilot Tracy (Amy Smart, in a cute little reunion since Road Trip); Duane (Seth Green) and Wayne (Vince Vieluf) are brothers and petty criminals looking for the scheme that will financially see them through the day; Owen (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is a recently disgraced football referee trying to avoid the attention of a public that hates his guts; and Enrico Pollini (Rowan Atkinson doing his best non-mute Bean) is a random narcoleptic Italian. Along the way they encounter minor characters played by the likes of Wayne Knight, Kathy Bates, Dean Cain and - of all fucking people - Gloria Allred.

Genuine reactions to co-starring with John Cleese

A long list of big names is only a small part of making a great movie. Actors are still people, and just like in less interesting work environments, people don't always work well together, they don't always turn out to be as qualified for the job as they first seemed, sometimes they realise they have taken a job that they hate and drop out. Sometimes the management doesn't deserve the talent they have hired. But then, sometimes, a really great combination of people, both in front of and behind the camera, is hit upon, and they produce something really special together. This doesn't always equate to initial box office or critical success, but it is often recognised eventually, as Rat Race has come to be in more recent years. 

Andy Breckman is credited for the script, but it is very obvious that the Zucker/Abrahams team have had either a direct or indirect hand in its structure and finer details. The likes of The Naked Gun and Airplane! have shown their ability to satisfactorily weave humour into traditional story arcs, and Rat Race is almost identical in basic format: major characters are succinctly introduced in small opening scenes, then the driving crisis or motivation takes the narrative lead, with much hilarity ensuing, before the crisis or motivation is brought to a decent conclusion, leaving us with a bunch of characters we are fond of, and a fairly basic story well told.

Well, you'll laugh later.

If one takes a cursory look at typical '80s and '90s comedy, whether on film or TV, and then does the same at a '00s or '10s production, there are a number of fundamental differences. Let's compare, for example, Airplane! and Jack and Jill *shudder*, or early Simpsons with more recent seasons of Family Guy. One of the most prominent differences is the set-up of what one might call a 'joke'. Earlier examples recognised a theatrical method that went into enjoyable comedy, and so would give a joke its source, its stream and its river, so to speak. Take the intercom skit at the beginning of Airplane!, which begins with the usual announcements we are all used to hearing at an airport; then the two announcers start opposing each other and arguing, before we finally realise that they are a recently broken-up couple using their work environment to take digs at each other. You wouldn't tell this as your typical anecdotal joke around the water cooler - it relies on a realistic context and human delivery, and it is this humanistic element that makes comedy truly great. Compare this, if you dare, to any sequence in Jack and Jill, that expects its audience to laugh at the mere mention of bodily fluid. Prolonged sequences showing us the results of Mexican food on the human bowel, and nothing about our characters, make for cheap laughs, if there are even people out there who still laugh at feces anymore. 

Rat Race allows each group of characters to realise their own plot thread, while cleverly crossing their paths every now and then en route to the finish line, and actually being funny. As the characters endure humiliating, terrifying, painful, and all too illegal calamities in pursuit of the prize money, Sinclair monitors them from Vegas, taking bets from his rich buddies on who will prosper, among other things. Their amusing little bets that punctuate the race action range from guessing how much a hooker would charge for a rather exotic 'party', to which hotel maid can hang from a curtain rail the longest. A thoroughly unexpected wrap-up of the race reunites Sinclair with the competitors, and leaves him thoroughly disgusted at the idea of having thrown away millions of dollars at once, for the first time in his life. 

Let's demonstrate what I mean about the clever style of comedy by breaking down one or two sequences from Rat Race. Bev having insisted that she and the kids accompany him on what is supposedly an urgent drive to a spontaneous job interview, Randy is unwilling to make any pit stops on his way to New Mexico. So when his young daughter needs to use the bathroom, a bit of back-and-forth within the car hard-cuts to the poor girl with her backside stuck out of the window of the speeding car. In itself, this is a funny outcome; but when the action later cuts back to Randy, having been pulled over by police, with an officer in the background angrily wiping down the windscreen of his car, the joke makes its slam dunk. Jack and Jill forces its audience to listen to a straight minute or so of fart noises while Jill mounts the toilet after her first taste of Mexican cuisine; Rat Race simply implies to us the more disgusting element of the situation, so that we can get straight to laughing at its aftermath.

Wait wait wait! What if we were the new 
panel on The View?

On another path, Vera and Meryl have crashed their car in the middle of the desert, and stumble upon a group of scientists preparing to make an attempt at the land speed record with a rocket car. Blagging their way into the cockpit by posing as models, they steal the car, and end up on a breakneck journey across the sand, jaws flapping. Meanwhile, apparently nearby, Nick and Tracy are being held up at gunpoint by a cowboy mechanic, who mocks them, insisting that if what he was doing was so wrong, the Heavenly Father would give him a sign. At that exact moment, the rocket car zooms by, the force of which brings the mechanic's establishment crashing to the ground. Then the joke goes that one step further, when the rocket car finally screeches to a halt, and the ladies, suffering severe motion sickness, are mistaken for members of a group of mental patients out on a trip in the desert, and taken aboard their bus.

It is this organic, unwinding motion of the comedy that makes it so damn satisfying. It's like going to throw away an empty cigarette carton, only to realise there is one cigarette left in there. This is how you make a joke runs its course, rather than wring itself dry. Compare either of the scenarios I have just explained to the dreadful 'Wonderful Life' argument over the dinner table in Jack and Jill. That scene (for some goddamn reason) thinks that the more times it makes the same non-joke in a row, the funnier it gets. It is absolutely possible to milk a single comedic idea, but it has to be nurtured, not tossed in mid-air and stretched transparent like a flimsy pizza base. There are very few bits in Rat Race that could be considered 'immediate gratification' humour. Zucker/Abrahams are habitual in their need to make art of a funny idea, and make it integral to the story they are trying to tell - because after all, they are telling an amusing story, not just shocking or sickening us into laughing in the moment. Every ridiculous scenario that befalls the characters has a direct impact on their journey, and like songs in a good musical, they are used to progress the plot, not stop it in its tracks and divert things.

The cast seeing the future of comedy

Comedy endings are hard to pull off in a way that satisfies the story, the character arcs and, importantly, the humour. The likes of Jack and Jill like to pretend that they have a heart at their core, and so follow the rom-com formula of having characters argue, go their separate ways, and romantically reunite before living happily ever after, but these sorts of movies often cast off the comedy element in favour of a more traditionally conclusive ending. Well Rat Race manages to give us an ending we really don't expect, which concludes the arc of each character without any individual coming out on top, and tie the loose ends of the story in a way that feels meaningful but not indulgent or overly sappy.

Comedy is walking a tightrope right now, and it looks as if it will never quite get to the other side, or even fall one way or the other. It feels like the line will just get thinner and thinner until nobody is willing to attempt the walk in the first place. In the era when people are deleting tweets just to avoid, or attempt to back-pedal on, social outrage, very few people are willing to put out an entire movie that demonstrates cutting commentary, or simply makes us laugh. Sacha Baron Cohen is the only exception that springs to mind. Although Airplane! still gets daytime reruns on TV, its content is heavily cut to make it acceptable to its viewing audience. Even Rat Race, a spring chicken of a movie, gets the same broadcast treatment, with a lot of the context of the comedy stripped. So many grounds the script dares to breach, such as Nazis, men in drag, porn and mental illness, would be avoided like the plague by movie-makers these days. People died in those camps; transgender people should not be joked about; misogyny should not be encouraged; mental illness is a pandemic to be understood and helped. I oppose none of these points, and importantly, nor does this movie. Fun is not being made of massacre or gender identity, but society's reactions to these topics are being used to frame the unwittingly horrendous situations the characters find themselves in.

Jon Lovitz realising that one day he would have some
douchebag tweeting at him for this.

Consider, for example, the scenario with the most elaborate set-up in the whole movie. As you will observe, it is a continually unfolding narrative, as characterises the movie. Desperate for a break from the road, Randy's daughter convinces him to stop at the signposted Barbie Museum, which turns out to be a shrine to SS figurehead Klaus Barbie, and not her beloved Mattel toy. When Duane and Wayne happen to pass by and notice their opponent's car, they vandalise it, forcing Randy to hijack Hitler's car from the museum parking lot. While driving, Eva Braun's mislaid dark lipstick gets smeared on the steering wheel, and a sudden brake sees the red-hot cigarette lighter fly into Randy's open mouth. By the time the car has been crashed into a WWII veterans celebration, he has acquired a moustache from the wheel and an unintelligible speaking voice from the burned tongue. His attempts to communicate his plight to the veterans in the crowd lead to him being shot at. The point of the joke is not the evils of the Nazi regime; the point is that Randy has, through a comedy of errors, come to be mistaken for someone impersonating Hitler in order to offend veterans. And this is about the most unwanted, uncomfortable situation that a person could find themselves in. That is why it is funny.