Blake Edwards’ The Great Race

A monumentally epic disaster, Blake Edwards’ The Great Race follows two mortal enemies – Jack Lemmon’s Professor Fate and Tony Curtis’ The Great Leslie – as they embark on an automobile race that’ll eventually pass through three continents. It’s immediately clear that filmmaker Blake Edwards isn’t looking to cultivate an atmosphere of subtlety here, as Blake Edwards’ The Great Race has been hard-wired with a decidedly over-the-top feel that’s reflected in all of the movie’s various elements – with everything from the performances to the set-pieces to the costume design pitched at a level of nails-on-a-chalkboard broadness. It’s a vibe that grows more and more oppressive as time progresses over the course of Blake Edwards’ The Great Race‘s interminable 160 minute running time, as Edwards proves unable to inject more than a handful of laughs into the film’s many, many jokes and gags. The episodic structure ensures that the narrative suffers from a palpable lack of momentum, as many of the film’s virtually stand-alone sequences manage to outstay their welcome almost from the get-go. (This is especially true of a painfully long, woefully unfunny segment set at a kingdom led by a ruler that happens to look exactly like Lemmon’s character.) Despite its plethora of deficiencies, however, Blake Edwards’ The Great Race‘s biggest disappointment is Lemmon’s larger-then-life, utterly misguided work here – as the actor, evidently channeling Dudley Do-Right’s Snidely Whiplash, delivers a relentlessly exaggerated performance that’s devoid of his usual charisma (ie the actor is just annoying, for the most part). By the time the less-than-hilarious showstopping pie fight rolls around, Blake Edwards’ The Great Race has confirmed its place as a trainwreck of catastrophic proportions and it’s ultimately difficult not to wonder just what Edwards was hoping to accomplish with this mess.

* out of ****