The Cannonball Run

MOVIE #1,350 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 02.05.24 • VOLUME LVII • It is somewhat inconceivable that in the span of only 50+ movies for this series, two of them wound up being the Hal Needham/Burt Reynolds goofball car-centric comedies Smokey and the Bandit and this film: the FAR stupider entry in the auto-comic sub-genre, which as I mentioned in that review is decidedly NOT FOR ME! I’m talking about 1981’s ZAZ-style farce The Cannonball Run. Whereas Smokey had a plot (albeit a very bad one), this is so insanely disjointed that I found it borderline unwatchable (and I, in fact, did not complete it). One second there's a Muslim sheik doing racist jokes then Terry Bradshaw is crashing a car into a motel swimming pool before we cut to a horny environmentalist ranting about the auto industry as they try to establish some semblance of a narrative.

The Rat Pack’s Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. are in this for some reason and at one point they dress up as priests? Sure…


That scene pretty much sums it up, but you could have chosen any at random, really: it's not funny but it's amusing in an almost anthropological sense, I suppose (if I’m being generous).

I know these movies have their devotees and God bless ‘em. But I hate cars and don’t really like most zany spoof-driven comedies, so I’ll simply leave it at that. 2/10

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The Cannonball Run is a 1981 action comedy film. It was directed by Hal Needham, produced by Hong Kong's Golden Harvest films, and distributed by 20th Century-Fox. Filmed in Panavision, it features an all-star ensemble cast, including Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLuise, Roger Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Jackie Chan and Dean Martin. The film is based on the 1979 running of the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, an actual cross-country outlaw road race beginning in Connecticut and ending in California. It was released on June 19, 1981.