Rat Race

Paramount Pictures | Release Date: August 17, 2001

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

52	METASCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 26 Critic Reviews

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Mixed:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

100

Mick LaSalle

The funniest film to come along since "South Park," and one that succeeds in a more difficult and satisfying way. Read full review

Lisa Alspector

Inspired, elaborately plotted, and unusually satisfying variable-speed chase comedy. Read full review

Jack Mathews

The movie is over in a breezy 112 minutes, but it may be another half-hour before your sides quit aching. Read full review

Lisa Schwarzbaum

The easygoing silliness with which this late-summer movie surprise scuttles from mayhem to mayhem and the verve with which the cast throws itself into the fray are so cheering and liberating. Read full review

Mr. ShowbizCody Clark

An outrageously silly movie that makes me laugh.

Richard Schickel

It's a fine madness, full of jaunty desperation, survivable disasters and the kind of ferocious concentration on a really stupid idea that once propelled Wile E. Coyote.

Desson Thomson

Even though this will not go down as a great Zucker comedy, he has made Rat Race funnier than it could reasonably hope to be. Read full review

Kim Morgan

Rat Race isn't a stupid movie -- it's an aggressively stupid movie that journeys into realms of absurdity that are, well, aggressively funny. Read full review

Rene Rodriguez

The movie is so cheerfully, furiously relentless, its contagious silliness wears you down. Read full review

Rita Kempley

And even though the jokes keep on coming, not all are side-splitters. But before it's all over, they will have viewers howling at one or more pants-wettingly silly moments. Read full review

Hazel-Dawn Dumpert

The good news is that this off-the-wall ensemble comedy may just be the summer's happiest surprise. Read full review

Kenneth Turan

Atkinson, somehow managing to be simultaneously delicate and broad, can do things with his face that shouldn't be legal. His delighted and delightful Mr. Pollini is a little taste of comic genius. Read full review

Jay Carr

A strong ending might have obscured the mediocrity in the writing, or at least diverted us, but the ending is sentimental where it needed to be hard-edged and comically merciless. For a film about people hurtling forward, Rat Race is pretty pedestrian.

Susan Wloszczyna

Hits its silly stride early and never shifts into a higher gear. Read full review

Lou Lumenick

A cheesy affair with no big winners. Especially the audience. Read full review

Mark Caro

Zucker gives the movie an ebullient spirit, but he also keeps everything at the same loud pitch throughout. Read full review

William Arnold

A sad, sad, sad, sad rip-off. Read full review

Michael Atkinson

Zucker's frenzied trifle is painless, with a few decent running gags -- and an ocean of bad ones. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineSteve Simels

For every inspired bit -- Templeton playing chauffeur to 40 I Love Lucy-era Lucille Ball impersonators -- there's one that falls spectacularly flat. Read full review

Michael Sragow

Despite these flaws, people sick of gross-out films and teen-sex comedy may be so hungry for farce that they laugh. Read full review

Peter Travers

Overheated, underdone farce. Race for the exit. Read full review

Robert Koehler

A lineup of comic actors running on empty long before the dust settles. Read full review

Joe Morgenstern

This ripoff, directed by Jerry Zucker, has a few funny moments, but it's a sad sad sad sad example of what Hollywood is currently serving up -- and what audiences are swallowing -- as summer entertainment.

A.O. Scott

It lumbers from one scene to the next with the stop-and-start mistiming generally seen in the outtakes shown at the end of the "Cannonball Run" movies, which this picture resembles in spirit. Read full review

Steven Rea

Somnambulistic pacing, kerplunkingly unfunny jokes, and mugging thespians making fools of themselves. Truly torturous spectacle. Read full review

New Times (L.A.)Robert Wilonsky

There's nothing more enervating than a stupid film with only random, and perhaps accidental, flashes of smarts; the rare prescient moments only serve to highlight how banal and vacant the rest of the movie is, especially when it stoops to conquer the gross-out market bled dry by the Farrelly Brothers and their myriad acolytes. Read full review