Rat Race is a hodgepodge film, filled primarily with visual gags and stunts, always pushing towards the ridiculous.

Donald Sinclair (John Cleese), a Casino owner in Las Vegas has created an unusual gambling event for his rich friends who are dying to bet on anything. He gives six groups of people a key to a locker in Silver City, New Mexico – a locker which holds two million dollars in cash – and his friends bet millions on who will be the winner.

As might be expected, each of the contestants rush to Silver City, each cheating and finagling their way there, while each run into unexpected setbacks that make up the core of the movie.

One group consists of two brothers on the hunt for money in Las Vegas, Duane (Seth Green) and the body pierced Blaine (Vince Vieluf).

Another contestant is an NFL referee named Owen Templeton (Cuba Gooding Jr.), who recently made some bad calls in a major game, keeps running into people who lost money because of him. His storyline has a few amusing moments as he hijacks a bus full of woman on their way to an “I Love Lucy” convention – all dressed up and acting like Lucy.

Randy (Jon Lovitz) is struggling to make it to New Mexico with his wife and whiny kids, and end up making enemies with a group of Nazis.

Vera Baker (Whoopi Goldberg) and her daughter Merrill (Lanei Chapman) make their way by stealing a jet car and breaking the land speed record as they go, and even manage to offend a Misery-esque Kathy Bates along the way.

Nick Shaffer (Breckin Meyer) plays the only reasonable character, who ends up joining up with Tracy (Amy Smart), a helicopter flyer who goes mad after discovering her boyfriend has cheated on her.

Rowan Atkinson had the potential to be the funniest as the narcoleptic Italian Enrico Pollini, but stretches the character to the point that most of the humor is lost. Enrico gets on board with a man delivering a human heart to New Mexico (Wayne Knight) – and the two of them manage to lose it along the way.

The funniest moments come from Cleese’s group of gamblers who bet on anything they can think of. The humor throughout the film is constantly over the top and largely physical – lots of car crashes, for example. In fact, I think every single character was involved in a vehicular accident of some sort – one involving a cow hanging from a hot air balloon. It’s all constantly ridiculous, but a number of moments can be pretty funny if you’re in the right mood.

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