THE SUMMER THROWAWAY MOVIE TRIUMPHANT........BQ TAKES A RUN AT "THE CANNONBALL RUN"

The Cannonball Run (1981)   Some may opine that Burt Reynolds frittered away his flourishing screen career by making slapdash, improvised car chase comedies..........which were little more than outtake gags stringed together.......

               Looking back on these films, like "Smokey And The Bandit" and the "Cannonball Run" movies.......we think Burt may have created a whole separate art form here.......an  ephemeral genre, though.

               It lived and died with the ups and downs of Reynold's career.

                But on another one of these sultry summer nights, nothing fit the bill better than another swift little movie that revels in its own silliness.....

                Unlike the similar "The Gumball Rally", which loaded up its cast with character actors whose faces, but not names were familiar, "The Cannonball Run" is heavily populated with people whose names and faces ring a bell right away.....

                  So we have Roger Moore as a delusional nice Jewish boy who thinks he's James Bond, Dom DeLuise as a delusional sidekick who thinks he's a superhero, Jack Elam as a delusional, bug-eyed lunatic who thinks he's a proctologist......and Farrah Fawcett flashing her teeth...…(which in 1981, was more than enough for Farrah Fawcett to do)

                   Oh right......did we forget to mention it's a cross country car race?  Does that even matter?

                   Everybody get regularly pulled over by the State Police, with little or no consequences.....but hey, that's the movies for ya.....

                   And nobody has a better time than Burt Reynolds, whose trademark high-pitched giggling should, at this point, be recorded for posterity and given a proper place in the Smithsonian.

                   We can't help falling for these harmless summer throwaways.......cause they're truly a long lost genre, never to be seen again.  Filled with dumb jokes and game celebrity actors just there to cop a few laughs, "The Cannonball Run" plays like a welcome spirit of long gone summers.......as soon as the first cold snap of Fall hits, we'll probably forget we ever watched it.

                   But for now, in a soupy, balmy July, 3 stars (***)