Rat Race

A group of billionaires led by a Las Vegas casino owner search for things to bet on. They decide to pull a group of six strangers together to race from Vegas to Silver City, New Mexico to retrieve $2 million hidden in a locker. The first one there gets all of the money. The first team are two addled brothers, Duane and Blaine, who talks indecipherably because of a newly-pierced tongue. When they cannot catch a plane, they plot to destroy an airport control tower. Their antics carry them into a hot-air balloon chase that catches a cow with a dangling rope and invades monster truck competition. The second team is a reunited mother and daughter; the daughter is struggling to start a business. They face an insane squirrel-selling woman and steal a rocket car scheduled for a land-speed-record attempt. A hated NFL referee is stranded in the desert by an irate cabbie and hijacks a busload of Lucille Ball lookalikes on the way to a convention. The Jewish family man on a family vacation joins the race without telling his wife why they are rushing across the country. When his daughter insists on stopping at a Barbie museum, it is without realization that it is the Klaus Barbie Nazi Museum. The escape from that location involves the theft of Hitler's personal touring car and culminates with Lovitz having his tongue burned and accidentally crashing into a WWII Veterans convention. A narcoleptic Italian gets a ride with an ambulance driver who is carting a human heart for a transplant. Through various ineptitude, the heart ends up flying out of the truck's window and the two must recover it from a playful dog. The final race member is a straight-laced future lawyer who at first declines to participate in the race, but rethinks his position after he meets a smart, beautiful woman who is flying a helicopter to New Mexico. He quickly finds out that she is unbalanced after she flies over her boyfriend's house and starts an attack on him when she sees him in the pool with an ex-girlfriend; an air pursuit results in the crash of the helicopter. Dave Thomas also appears as Cleese's humorless attorney.