Back in the day when Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay were still pals, they stumbled upon a winning formula for comedy with 2004’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which goosed TV newsrooms while simultaneously skewering the Dumb American Male over a fire pit. The humor was silly, largely improvisational, and devoted to a spirit of anarchy.
That movie’s basic plot — self-satisfied macho idiot wins it all, then loses it all —was successfully grafted on to 2006’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. The chief difference this time around: The jabs are aimed at NASCAR culture instead of TV news.
Ferrell stars as cocky Ricky Bobby, destined for the literal fast track from the moment he is blasted out of his mother’s womb in the backseat of a speeding Chevelle. “If you ain’t first, you’re last,” his pot-dealing, no-account father (Gary Cole) tells young Ricky, instilling in the boy a lifelong obsession with winning. Fortunately for Ricky, he rises quickly to NASCAR stardom, acquiring all the trappings of southern-fried success, including a lakeside mansion, blonde trophy wife (Leslie Bibb) and two foulmouthed boys named Walker and Texas Ranger (Houston Tumlin and Grayson Russell, respectively).
Ricky’s need for speed is rivaled only by his oversized ego, and so he flips out when a Formula One champion racer, Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen), arrives on the scene. Girard is everything that Ricky and his best friend, fellow racer Cal Naughton Jr. (John C. Reilly), fear and loathe. Girard is a gay French intellectual who reads Camus and sips macchiato, sometimes in the middle of racing.
Ricky buckles under the stress of this newfound competition. After a bone-crushing crash, he suffers a nervous breakdown and — this being a Will Ferrell movie — darts around a racetrack, stripped down to his BVDs. So begins the inevitable downfall. He suffers delusions that he is paralyzed and eventually lands work delivering pizzas on a bicycle while his gold-digger wife shacks up with Cal. Will our hero bounce back and redeem himself?
Talladega Nights is unmistakably a Will Ferrell vehicle, but the actor is magnanimous enough to allow plenty of shining moments for a first-rate supporting cast that includes Michael Clarke Duncan, Amy Adams and Molly Shannon. In an environment that obviously relied on improv, Reilly, Cohen and Bibb are uniformly terrific; Cohen is a particular standout, sporting the most tortured French accent since Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau.
As they did in Anchorman, co-writers Ferrell and McKay employ a kitchen sink aesthetic, hurling gobs of running gags against the wall in hopes that enough shtick sticks. To their credit, much of it is hilarious. There are several memorable set pieces, especially an uproarious dinner scene in which Ricky directs his prayer of grace to “baby Christmas Jesus,” (8 lbs, 9 oz., if you’re curious) Ricky’s preferred incarnation of Christ.
Moreover, Talladega Nights is one of the few motion pictures in recent memory in which shameless product placement actually works, reflecting NASCAR’s obsession with corporate sponsorship. You’ve gotta admire any movie that actually interrupts its climax for an Applebee’s commercial.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 