Zero Stars, Full Throttle: CANNONBALL RUN 3 (1989)

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This is the fifth and final review of the Outlaw Road-Race Movies. We’ve reviewed ‘Cannonball!’ with Richard Carradine, ‘The Gumball Rally’ with Michael Sarrazin, plus ‘Cannonball Run’ and ‘Cannonball Run 2’ with Burt Reynolds. The end of the road is ‘Cannonball Run 3′.

By 1989, the anger that fuelled the original Cannonball movies had mostly burned off. In the mid-1970s, drivers were furious about the national 55 MPH speed limit, catalytic converters, unleaded gasoline, strangled horsepower and a growing sense that the government wanted to regulate every mile of the open road. Both ‘Cannonball!‘ and ‘The Gumball Rally‘ emerged from that frustration. Driving coast to coast at triple-digit speeds was more than sport. It was protest. Sixteen years after the first Arab oil crisis, however, the public was no longer boiling over. The outlaw racers had become a fun-loving gang of hooligans on a family road trip, only faster and with much cooler cars.

After the dreadful but profitable ‘Cannonball Run 2‘ producer Albert S. Ruddy returned for another lap. Almost none of the original cast came back, replaced by John Candy, Eugene Levy, Joe Flaherty and other familiar faces from the unloved-by-many ‘SCTV’. The result feels unmistakably Canadian: low-budget, cheap, shabby and packed with performers who know they are working with thin material.

Although ‘Cannonball Run 3: Speed Zone’ (a.k.a. ‘One for the Money’, ‘Cannonball Fever’, ‘Speed Zone’ and ‘Speedzone Fever’) was not technically one of Canada’s notorious tax-shelter movies, but it inherited their DNA. During the 1970s, generous tax deductions encouraged investors to finance Canadian productions regardless of whether anyone particularly wanted to see them. The system produced legitimate classics, but also warehouses full of cheap genre pictures featuring faded movie stars, Canadian locations pretending to be the U.S. and budgets stretched like elastic bands. ‘Cannonball Run 3: Speed Zone’ arrived after that era, yet still carried plenty of tax-shelter DNA.

The plot barely matters. Another batch of celebrities races from east coast to west coast, this time wrapping up at the Santa Monica Pier. An obsessive police captain will stop at nothing to end the Cannonball race for good. But the movie just warms up old plot points, like hiding a Cannonball race car on a transport truck to hide from the cops, and even putting an airplane on the highway. But unlike Cannonball Run 2, this movie actually remembers that this is the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash and focuses more on the racing.

The machinery includes a Nissan 300ZX, C4 Corvette, Jaguar XJ-S, a red Bentley Continental Convertible and Richard Petty’s unmistakable No. 43 NASCAR stock car. The Bentley belongs to the Smothers Brothers, wealthy cheats who plan to fly ahead and simply collect another identical car near the finish, which is a plot point borrowed from ‘The Gumball Rally’.

The red Lamborghini Countach 5000 is the movie’s automotive highlight, and its strongest link to the earlier films. Production alternated between a real Countach and a stunt replica, with the windshield wiper providing the easiest clue: diagonal on the genuine Lamborghini, horizontal on the impostor. Predictably, the replica handles the dirt roads, jumps and now-legendary opening stunt in which the Countach skips across a lake like am expensive Italian stone.

The black Ferrari Daytona Spyder carries the film’s “hot chicks,” although this time the women are smart, capable and one attends MIT. Better still, the Ferrari is not a Ferrari at all. It is a McBurnie replica built on a C3 Corvette chassis, reportedly the same stunt car driven by Sonny Crockett in ‘Miami Vice’! The Daytona had already survived television stardom before being drafted into the Cannonball.

The three Cannonball Run films had similar budgets, but their box-office returns collapsed from roughly $160 million, down to $56 million, then a paltry $3 million. The rebellion was over, the audience had gone home and the Cannonball finally ran out of road. Yet ‘Cannonball Run 3: Speed Zone’ earns one grudging salute: it may be cheap, recycled and barely related to the original series, but at least it crosses the finish line with a Jaguar XJ-S flying through the air and crashing into a fleet of police cars.

One final outrageous stunt before the credits rolled on the Cannonball for good.

By every conventional measure, ‘Cannonball Run 3: Speed Zone’ was a wreck. It earned barely $3 million against an estimated $18 million budget, received three Golden Raspberry nominations and sent Brooke Shields home with the award for Worst Supporting Actress. Critics gave it zero stars, thumbs down, and more than three decades later, it still sits at 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Yet those are conventional measures, and car guys are not conventional moviegoers. Ignore the dialogue, acting and plot, and there are still 94 minutes of Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Jaguars, police cars and aircraft behaving irresponsibly at high speed. It is cheap, recycled and frequently fast fun that’s almost impossible to take seriously. The Cannonball may have run out of road, but it went out exactly as it should have: speeding, airborne, and surrounded by police cars.

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