The Cannonball Run (1981) 1/2 * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1999 by Serdar Yegulalp
It's hard to think of a worse movie than "The Cannonball Run". No, really. I've tried. I spent a solid hour with friends (and a good deal of beer) trying to find a worse movie, but it's slim pickings. This is the sort of film that's so terminally wretched that it's not even worth making fun of.
"The Cannonball Run" is actually a remake, in a sense, of the much-funnier and more spirited "Gumball Rally." That movie was a goofy piece of all-star nonsense about an illegal coast-to-coast auto marathon. "Cannonball Run" takes the same basic idea, beats it to death, and props up the corpse in the driver's seat of a racecar.
The one most responsible for this mess appears to be Hal Needham, who made his when the two "Smokey and the Bandit" movies popped out of nowhere and capitalized on the whole trucker/CB/bandit/good-ol'-boy mythology. The original "Bandit" movie was sly and funny, but in this movie Needham (who was originally a stunt coordinator) has given up on anything remotely resembling a story and just gives us a bunch of assembly-line cameos. Dom DeLuise and Burt Reynolds are not so much stars, you see, as cameos who get more screen time.
DeLuise and Reyonds are not the only ones who get to embarrass themselves criminally. For instance, Roger Moore plays a guy who thinks he's James Bond -- or maybe he just plays James Bond, period; a movie this shallow doesn't have enough brains to entertain anything nearly as witty as the first option. Jackie Chan (in one of his first American roles) doesn't get to do anything other than make goofy faces. And as for Sammy Davis Jr., Jamie Farr and Farrah Fawcett -- they're all a blur, without even the depth of a character in a "Saturday Night Live" sketch. Por ejemplo: Farr's character, "The Sheik", has the germ of a funny idea in there somewhere, but the movie doesn't have him do much of anything other than throw money out his car window and shout "This is for you and the dust!"
Still... in a weird way, I sort of miss movies this utterly empty-headed. Today comedies try so hard to load up on "satirical" barbs or cross-referenced in-jokes that they often cease to be funny. Movies like "The Cannonball Run" expired around the same time as knock-knock jokes and fake plastic vomit -- although I leave to you whether that's a mercy or not.
Final consumer note: Outtakes at end of film are funnier than anything that precedes them.
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