THE CANNONBALL RUN (1981)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
I'll make this quick and easy to digest: this is a rotten film. It is so slipshod, so mangled in its camerawork and editing, so desperately unfunny that I can't quite put it any other way. The virtues of this film is singular: Burt Reynolds has his boyish charm - that's it. He proved it in "Smokey and the Bandit" and through the early part of the 1980's, he kept trying to prove it ("Stroker Ace" was the nadir of Reynolds' career, if you ask me). But boyish charm with no inner life or character to play is not exactly a stroke of cinematic genius either in these Hal Needham flicks.
The pitfalls are as follows: Dom DeLuise is grating in more ways than one, Farrah Fawcett shows she didn't fare any better than in her foolish "Charlie's Angels" series, Jackie Chan would probably rather continue his "Drunken Master" series, and Sammy Davis Jr. and Dino posing as priests might have wished they were performing in Vegas. Roger Moore and Jack Elam give the bare minimum of a story a spin. Other than that, the outtakes are much funnier. A shame it takes one hour and a half to get there.
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