slow starter that eventually picks up speed

Rating: 7/10 (27 March 2007)

"Talladega Nights" starts off rather badly but improves considerably as it goes along. In this affectionate and comical tribute to all things NASCAR, Will Ferrell plays a premiere racer who loses all his self-confidence when a hotshot driver from France (played by Sacha Baron Cohen) challenges his supremacy on the track.
At first the humor is strictly strained slapstick, too tame to be genuinely satirical and too vulgar to be anything but lowbrow, but long about the halfway point, Farrell and director Adam McKay's screenplay suddenly hits the right combination of amiable quirkiness and sweet-natured sentiment and the movie cruises along to the finish line.
More than anything else, the success of the film lies in its performances, which are uniformly endearing and high-spirited. Beyond Ferrell and Boren, there's a great deal of fun to be had from the likes of John C. Reilly, Michael Clark Duncan, Molly Shannon, Gary Cole, and Leslie Bibb, among others, all of whom slide into their roles with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of comic talent. They alone help to compensate for the excessive length of the film, its tendency towards attenuation, and the overall dearth of laughs in the early stages.