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And maybe that’s the problem. As I mentioned before, The Cannonball Run is all premise and nothing more. Let’s just dress Sammy Davis, Jr and Dean Martin as priests, give them Magnum PI’s car and a bottle of whiskey and... ACTION!!!! The worst part is that this movie, written by famed auto journalist Brock Yates, is based on a thing that actually happened - so how hard did it have to be to make a coherent story out of it? WHY does this race exist? WHY are these guys dressed as priests? WTH is up with Dom DeLuise and the cape? Who is this Joe Biden lookalike trying to stop the race and why do the police do what he says? Is there even a reward for winning? And why doesn’t Burt Reynolds ever get to make out with Farrah Fawcett? What’s up with that? I don’t know - but I do know that all you had to do was throw in a vaguely linear plot, a whisper of a backstory for at least one character...maybe some stolen jewels….come on, it’s not that hard.

Instead what we have is a series of pointless mugging, unrelated inside jokes, and a handful of drunk driving and date rape gags that don’t really land the way they did back in the good old days. Plus, the way Farrah Fawcett eventually died makes some of the jokes at her expense feel, in retrospect a little unfortunate. Cannonball really has very little going for it, but among the positives are Roger Moore, whose James Bond parody is so effortless it occurs to me that he was probably never acting in the first place. Reynolds himself is at his droll best, and in fact most of the cast fill out their roles well - but there’s nothing for them to DO other than stand around smirking while they wait for the Stereotype Wheel to come around again.

The bottom line is (and forgive me for being blunt, but we’re talking about a movie where Chinese people play Japanese people yet continue speaking Chinese because it’s all the same, right?) The Cannonball Run is nothing more than a convenient way to charge us all good money to watch a handful of famous people stand around and jerk each other off for 90 minutes.

I have less of a problem with anything that happens in this movie than I do with the fact that none of the action actually goes anywhere, or serves any purpose. A mash-up of The Italian Job and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is what we are promised, but what gets delivered is a dream crushing, childhood-ruining 55 gallon drum of chunks - expiration date December, 1981.

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