Cannonball Run II (1984)

The Age of Commercialism

Captivating movie !

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Cannonball Run II is the sequel for The Cannonball Run.A bunch of crazy people go racing all around the country-illegally, of course.Hal Needham's movie from 1984 has got the best and the biggest stars there could be.Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise make us laugh.Mr.Cool and Mr. Bojangles Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. make a terrific couple.Then there's the third member of the rat pack, Frank Sinatra himself.Marilu Henner and Shirley MacLaine as the naughty sisters are wonderful.Jackie Chan is there with Jaws of the James Bond films, big man Richard Kiel.Don Knotts is hilarious kissing the orangutan.The great comedian Sid Caesar tries to catch the big fish.Jack Elam is there with his shots.The hairless Telly "Kojak" Savalas is very convincing as the bad guy.Abe Vigoda is fantastic as the gangster in the Godfather way.Then there are greats such as Jamie Farr, Tim Conway, Tony Danza, Ricardo Montalban, Charles Nelson Reilly, Henry Silva, and Jack's son Chris Lemmon.This movie offers many fun moments.I sure had fun watching it.

This film has no race and no chase. Okay there is a race but it has really nothing to do with the movie. The first film of course is all about "The Cannonball Run", which is an illegal race from coast to coast, written by Brock Yates who, along with director Hal Needham, actually drove an ambulance across America - and it's Yates who invented the Cannonball Run. In the original, Burt and Dom use the very same ambulance; now we have a sequel which isn't written by Yates, and is as bad a sequel as I've yet to witness on screen. As mentioned, the actual coast to coast race has little to do with anything this time around. Instead there's a lame subplot about mobsters trying to hijack Jamie Farr's character, an Arab with tons of oil money who this time around is funding the prize at the finish line. So basically this is a comic mobster film with a bunch of actors thrown in who are driving cars. Jack Elam, who is incredible in the first film, is thrown in as wallpaper. Burt and Dom are horrible and lazy; you can tell they were just doing the film for a paycheck. Shirley Maclaine and Marilu Henner play actresses dressed as nuns, and we have to sit through people doing double-takes as these impostor penguins curse in public. Boring. Horrible. Jackie Chan is even ruined this time around. In the first film Roger Moore plays a guy who thinks he's Roger Moore, and thus he drives a gadget filled car, ala Bond. This time around, Chan, who had some gadgets of his own in the original, has even more gadgets as he's basically replacing the Moore/Bond character from the original. And his driver is Richard Kiel, best known as Bond nemesis "Jaws". Chan's car even goes under water, just like Bond's car in "The Spy Who Loved Me" (which featured Kiel). Other contestants include an ape teamed up with Tony Danza. All I have to ask Tony is: Didn't "Going Ape" teach you not to work with primates? Jamie Farr's character is ruined because he's too involved; his sheik was far better as a cameo in the original. And Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr are totally wasted this time, disguised as cops instead of priests, and they don't even get into any trouble. Burt and Dom are dressed as soldiers; Burt is a general and Dom is a private. They pick up Jim Nabors along the way, as "Private Lyle" (guess what they're spoofing here?) and his cameo is as useless as an air conditioner in an igloo. It doesn't feel as if there is any "need" to win the race for any of the characters. You forget there is even a race at all. Man, I tell you, this is one of the worst sequels - if not the worst sequel ever, ever, ever made. Avoid it at all costs. Even as a kid I knew it was chum.

I wouldn't even bother commenting on the execrable cesspool of a film if its very existence didn't offend me.I hated this film. Hated it to a degree that I cannot even find the words to express myself. This is literally (and I do mean literally; this is not hyperbole) the low point of western civilization since the Spanish Inquisition.I enjoy a goofy Saturday afternoon or late night insomnia movie like anyone. I even enjoy bad movies if they are bad in a charming or kitschy way. What really makes this movie offense and vulgar is the sense of smug satisfaction of the giant ensemble cast.One of the worst feelings you can experience is embarrassment for another person, and this movie is, from beginning to end, a combination of feeling embarrassed for everyone involved coupled with insult and outrage. The idea that someone would find this worth watching is insulting. The idea that such a thing as this movie should even exist on a roll of film somewhere is offensive. I will have trouble sleeping knowing that somewhere within one thousand miles of me, some unclean television sits that once showed even a split second of this film.Quite literally, you, who are reading this comment, could have made a better film if I handed you a home video camera and shoved you out into the desert, then kneecapped you and left you for dead without water so that all you could film was the meager piece of ground you were capable of crawling across.I am wounded psychologically from having to sit through the sight of Burt Reynolds, Sammy Davis, and Dom DeLuise in drag.I could go cast member by cast member here, each of whom should be ashamed of themselves to this day and should be made to atone for their sins before a public tribunal of fire and pitchforks and angry mobs. All of my political principles go out the door when it comes to this movie - I want to see someone hanged, publicly and brutally, for bringing this abomination of a film into existence. I want to go Jacques deMolay on the whole cast. Forget dreading Friday the 13th; we should all rue the day this film was released, instead.I am permanently and incurably scarred by having to look at cars in this movie from the worst era for car design in the auto industry's history. What in God's name were people thinking in the 1980s - about EVERYTHING? The Mitsubishi in particular is one of the most shameful and odious pieces of machinery I have ever had the misfortune of laying my eyes on. I have yet to encounter anything, for example, in the dark recesses of the internet, so thoroughly offensive as the vehicles in this miserable "film." This is a movie about a race; the least they could have done is found some decent cars rather than relying on the miserable, unclean, blasphemous detritus of the era. The cars and Burt Reynold's mustache in this film are an affront to God and humanity. Each should be punished severely and swiftly. I want to hear someone scream.This is a movie full of people very amused with themselves with zero regard for the audience. The contempt for the audience is palpable. Not a single shred of effort was made - this is Burt and Dom partying on someone else's dollar, and the film itself equates to abuse and trauma. Not a single idea here is new - simian (literally) humor, dressing people up in drag, stereotypes, and a bunch of unlikely and trite crashes and disasters evoke nothing so much as Stalin era gulags and syphilis experiments.I hate this movie. Hate everything about it. Hate its presumptuousness, hate every actor who appeared for appearing in it. The entire acting career of everyone involved here should be completely discredited simply by virtue of appearing in this film. I want to see people kicked out of SAG, blacklists, exile, and angry mobs rampaging through the streets of Beverly Hills or Malibu or wherever these people live. I want to see tribunals and fire and primitive religious symbols and hooded men with axes.I will never be the same again, and I curse the day I saw this film.I have seen many movies, and this, I have to say, is the worst movie ever made. I am an enthusiastic and radical opponent of censorship but I make an exception for this witless, charmless, unfunny, vacuous disgrace of a film. Every copy in existence should be hunted down and burned, and any note of its existence should be wiped out of film guides and so on under penalty of death. When this campaign ends, we should start history over with Year 1. History should be rewritten, exactly as it happened, minus the existence of this film. Penalties should be doled out. We are talking stretch racks and iron maidens and bamboo under fingernails.I HATE THIS MOVIE.

The guy who wrote the review, "Danza Vs Orangutan" got it completely right, except I think the question isn't whether or not the Orangutan is a better actor than Danza, it's whether the Orangutan in the more highly evolved. Again, Danza Loses.This is a crummy, stinking horrible film that is great after the second six pack on a Friday night. I rated it "5" because it's technically a "0," but it is as big a laugh as a real "10" film made by sapient beings. If you claim to be a bad movie buff but you haven't stepped in this pile of excrement yet, you haven't been trying.My suggestion: see it. Sure, the wince factor is high here, but the movie will certainly make you feel a LOT better about yourself...you know you're smarter and cooler than anyone associated with this gobbler.