“Talladega Nights” Review

SPOILERS BELOW!

It's all highly predictable, so why not spoil the plot straight away? Ricky Bobby (Ferrell) is a NASCAR driver whose childhood and lifelong ambition is to "go fast", and whose racing mantra, instilled into him by his dead-beat, often-absent father (Gary Cole, known to the respectable ones among you as Vice President Bob Russell from The West Wing, and to the less respectable among you as Mike Brady from The Brady Bunch Movie), is taken straight out of Michael Schumacher's little red book: if you're not first, you're last.

He shoots to the top of the NASCAR pile, helped by an ever-compliant team-mate, Cal Naughton, Jr (John C. Reilly). Again, the Schumi philosophy... He also gains a ditzy wife (Leslie Bibb) and has two scene-stealing foul-mouthed children, named Walker and Texas Ranger. But his world is shattered - of course, as it has to be - by the arrival of a stereotypically French, jazz-listening, ostentatiously gay, and highly antagonistic ex-F1 driver, Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen).

Girard promises to defeat Ricky Bobby, and when in front, defends his position by weaving all over the track (Schumi strike three), all whilst sipping cups of macchiato and reading French philosophy texts by Albert Camus (perhaps taking a book out of renowned scholar George W. Bush's library). Shock horror, the inevitable accident happens. Ricky is not hurt physically, but mentally and emotionally he is scarred - quite hilariously so. He even loses his wife to a suddenly self-serving Naughton.

But let's not get too serious here, because, as with so many Ferrell films, it's the ludicrous that remains memorable. There's how Bobby gets his drive in the first place - when the regular driver gets out for a hamburger, mid-race. There's his inability to mumble anything intelligible when interviewed, as a perfect spoof of drivers who've turned sound-bytes and sponsor-mentioning into an art form. There's the psychosis he enters after his Big Crash. His melodramatic belief that he's on fire has a certain, dare we say it, Nigel Mansell-esque quality about it - so long as we never see Nige strip to his underwear.

The subsequent hospital scenes are unwatchably funny. And of course there's how, as always, our hero comes back to 'win' the Talladega 500, even if it ends in a battle, mano-a-mano, with Girard. And it is in fact Baron Cohen as Girard who is at his entirely unbelievable, over-the-top, absurd best, with his stupidly bad French accent. His performance almost makes you want to see his controversial Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan just to see what kind of havoc he will wreak in that role.

The supplicant-team-mate-turned-nasty-rival theme is a bit of a novelty in racing films, but for F1 fans it has serious Schumacher-(insert name of team-mate) overtones. Now if only Rubens Barrichello should show quite as much drive as Cal Naughton, Jr. does, now that he's stepped out from Schumi's shadow! But do we need yet another woman-stealing subplot? It was there in Driven, and here it is again. There's not much point dragging out the old Schumacher-married-Frentzen's-former-girlfriend references.

Perhaps one of our favourite moments, though, is when TV presenters discuss Girard, this new French ex-F1 arrival, along with brief hazy shots of F1 footage to illustrate his European prowess. Except that the scene shown is from the Nurburgring in 2004, and it's Gianmaria Bruni in a Minardi about to get lapped by a Renault! Oh the irony of it all. It had us in stitches for several moments, although we wonder why, if they had to show a Minardi, they couldn't find footage of He Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned instead.

And there are those monotonous impossibilities that tend to infest any racing movie. Like how you simply change gears and slam hard on the accelerator to pass someone on a superspeedway. Like how all crashes inevitably end up in cars barrel-rolling forever and ever. I thought that only applied to Ryan Newman in reality. To these fallacies Ferrell adds a new one - that it is possible to drive in reverse at full racing speed and to win a race that way. And why the hell not?!

But this isn't serious. It's not really even a NASCAR movie. It's more a typical character-mockery comedy Ferrell-style. The thing that keeps the movie from scaling the comedic heights is the nagging feeling that the filmmakers are pandering to the very people they're satirising. We'll give it a 5 out of 10 for entertainment, plus 0.5 each for Ferrell, Baron Cohen and Bruni, and minus 2 for the average racing sequences, giving a grand total of 4.5 out of 10.