Cynical and rather ordinary feature that has nothing going for it bar the novelty value of seeing all these names and faces on screen at once.

Rating: 5/10 (29 August 2009)

The Cannonball Run was worse than I thought it might have been; a wax-work museum of yester-decade stars of the previous generation, mugging their way through a plot-less, rather humourless, but pro-consumerist and recklessness road movie during which its characters start at point 'A'; physically travel through to point 'Z' but basically end up right where they began in terms of everything else. It must've been a sad moment, back in the day, when children, young adults and seasoned adults alike were watching their past/current heroes in the form of Dean Martin; Sammy Davis Jr; Burt Reynolds and Roger Moore engaging in nothing more than tired pastiches; slapstick comedy and acting as pawns for advertisements.
The film doesn't even deliver on what it promises in the form of a race of some kind. The opening is overly long; too talky and takes too much time establishing what are essentially either clichés or archetypes, while for all the talk and build up of the race, it's essentially nothing more than a rare series of pratfalls and incidences in which in order to laugh, you have to find either speeding cars; women in revealing outfits or persons impersonating those of a medical profession, funny. In a bizarre change of tact towards the end, there is a mass-brawl between the racers and a load of bikers; the leader of which is Peter Fonda who I guess is sending up his Easy Rider role, which just sees the film throw its hands up and announce that: 'Yes, we've finally run out of ideas'.
The Cannonball Run gets across its highly unmotivated and desperate sense of the sheer spectacle to act as a means of laughter, very early on, when two characters whom are the closest we have to anything at all resembling 'leads', land an aeroplane in the middle of a public street, run into a shop and buy beer before taking off again. The characters are J.J. McClure (Reynolds) and Victor Prinzim (DeLuise), two people that later acquire a van, disguise it as an ambulance, kidnap a woman, bung her in the back and pretend to be off somewhere where she can receive help – and they're the one's we're supposed to root for. Along for the ride is Jack Elam's doctor, named Nikolas Van Helsing; an incompetent and slurring individual who's the victim of one of the film's many re-occurring gags; that being that he has an odd looking face and that if we crash zoom in onto it to some mock-horror organ music now and again, everyone will laugh. Another rather sad, tragic even, ingredient to this quartet is DeLuise's character's habit of donning a cape and mask; from whence he brandishes them from, I'm not sure; and breaking off into bizarre, mock-super hero skits complete with his own fan-fare sound effects. While everyone else watches on and, I'm sure, laughs their heads off; I actually found it quite sad to watch.
Partaking in the race, a journey from Connecticut to California, are a number of names and faces doing it purely for kicks. Jackie Chan and Michael Hui are the more technologically-advanced-than-anyone-else-Japanese, although they themselves are Chinese and according to what I read, they speak Cantonese on a Japanese TV show when selected for the race. They exist solely to provide advertising for Subaru. Then we have Roger Moore, a man playing a character named Seymour Goldfarb, Jr.; who's a send up of his James Bond character, a role he still occupied at the time of shooting.
His inclusion reminds me of a recent time when the producers took years and years to make a sequel to 1998's The Mask of Zorro, while in the meantime Banderas, who played the role of Zorro, sent up the character in 2004's Shrek 2 by way of voicing Puss in Boots. A year after that film, a sequel was actually made, entitled The Legend of Zorro, with Banderas once again back in the role. No, hang on. A year ago you were creating a pastiche and sending up this character for the comic creation it was. Now you've gone back to it and you're making heaps of money in the process out of, what is essentially, something you've already discarded as a joke. Moore in The Cannonball Run fits exactly this situation. He sends the thing up in a tired spoof, then goes back to it for consequent Bond films Octopussy and A View to a Kill. Suddenly we're supposed to forgive and forget? I don't think so. Was it not the case that after The Cannonball Run, everyone got on Moore's back over his Bond role?
Then you've got the slack-jawed Southerners; the typically rich, eccentric Arabs in the form of Jamie Farr's Sheik plus the jewellery-clad African-Americans, all of whom are partaking. Where does it all lead? Well, it leads to a glut of Goodyear tyres and Camel cigarettes product placement, while at one point, DeLuise is relegated to that of a performance chimp as he dances in front of the camera and sings a Dr Pepper jingle; seconds after it ends, the film restarts again with Reynolds walking back into shot ready to spout the next line of dialogue that'll move everyone on to the next pratfall. It's a shame that so many people have taken to this; like with most films of this ilk, I'm tempted to say that when people come to re-view The Cannonball Run, they're reviewing their childhoods and how happy they were when they first saw the film as opposed to how good it is as a stand alone piece. But with a distinctly leery sensibility at times; a running theme of total disregard to superiors and authoritarian figures, such as the law enforcement, plus every highway code rule broken under the pretence of "We're having fun", The Cannonball Run burns out pretty quickly after the starter's gun goes off.