Remember Burt Reynolds? Remember his gripping performance in "Deliverance"? Remember the classic wit he displayed in "Smokey and the Bandit"? Remember when Burt was a star? Okay, forget all that.

"Cannonball Run" is very loosely based on an actual, underground coast-to-coast race. One year it was won by two guys and a girl in a an ambulance, who predicted (accurately) that police would not stop an ambulance no matter how fast it was going. The scriptwriters took this and added an all-star cast and built a movie around it. They made the racers a mixed bag of weird sorts, including a spoiled rich-guy who teams up with a fat man in drag and dresses up like a honeymooning couple, Jackie Chan and a computer genius in a ultra-high tech car from Japan, and Jaime Farr who plays an Arabian oil shiek (ethnic stereotyping, ain't it a hoot?). The oddest of all is Roger Moore, who plays a man with a delusion that he is Roger Moore (mental illness, ain't it a hoot?). Burt stars as the previous year's winner, out to keep his title. Along for the ride are Dom DeLuise, who has an alternate superhero personality (mental illness, ain't it still a hoot?), and Farrah Fawcett who gets hijacked into joining them as the "patient" in their ambulence.

Other notables in this movie are Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Jack Elam. After the main characters are all introduced, the race begins, and the lucky audience gets to follow their various adventures, liberally laced with ethnic digs, lessons that all men are stupid, and frequent opportunities to ridicule the Environmental Protection Agency (always a good target).

You would think the movie is trying not to take itself too seriously, until we get to the conversations our heroes have inside the ambulence. Dom talks about being bullied as a child, and Burt talks about how his father died three days before he was going to retire. But how are we supposed to take anything in this movie seriously after an onslaught of Roger Moore's delusions that he is a spy, Jaime Farr's Arabian stereotyping, and Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., dressed up like Catholic priests and regretting not disguising themselves as Methodists so they can hit on the female racers?

This isn't to say that the movie isn't enjoyable, or even that it isn't effectively funny in a few parts. Heck, compared to "Stocker Ace" or "Paternity" this movie is first rate. Still, one has to wonder what the actors were thinking this movie would do to their careers.

And yet most of them signed back on for Cannonball Run II. Go figure.