Rat Race” is a loving salute to the spirit of “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World,” a splendid salute to slapstick that featured just about everyone who happened to be in Hollywood in 1965. “Rat Race” has an all-star cast playing characters who all want to be the first one to a $2 million treasure and will do anything — ANYTHING to get it. It is outrageous, cheerfully vulgar, undeniably lowbrow, and very, very funny.

John Cleese plays a Donald Trump-style casino owner who has a plan to attract the really high rollers. He will let them bet on a race between creatures who can think, plan, and lie — humans. Six randomly selected customers of the casino are each given a key to a box in a train station in Utah. Inside the box is $2 million, and the first one there gets it all. The six include Rowan Atkinson as a narcoleptic Italian, Cuba Gooding, Jr. as a disgraced football referee (he blew the call on the coin toss), Whoopi Goldberg as a woman just reunited with the daughter she hasn’t seen since she was a baby, Brecken Meyer as a conservative lawyer who always plays by the rules, Jon Lovitz as a father on vacation with his family, and Seth Green and Vince Vieleuf as small-time con artists. Along the way, they meet up with the prettiest helicopter pilot in the world (Amy Smart, brilliantly funny), neo-Nazis, real-life superlawyer Gloria Allred, a rocket car, a truck driver delivering some very important and delicate cargo, and a bus full of Lucy impersonators. There is a lot of good, old-fashioned, hit-on-the-head humor, but it’s like a Road Runner cartoon — everyone bounces back without a scratch in the next scene, ready to get right back into the game.

Director Jerrry Zucker, shows the sure hand with sight gags that brought us “Airplane!” While this does not have that movie’s surreal moments of comic ecstasy, its stronger narrative coherence and more interesting characters make it almost as satisfying. All of the performances are delights. Kathy Bates’s brief cameo as a woman who really likes squirrels and Amy Smart’s expression when she dive-bombs her cheating boyfriend (played by TV Superman Dean Cain), Vieluf’s encounter with his multi-pierced dream girl, Seth Green’s encounter with a monster truck rally, and Kathy Najimy’s encounter with the Barbie Museum are among the funniest movie moments in years. And the final resolution beats “It’s a Mad…World” by a thousandfold.

Parents should know that the PG-13 rating comes from some vulgar humor, including bathroom jokes, a weird proposition made to a prostitute, an offensive porn movie title, and a cross-dressing man. A multiply-pierced woman flashes her breasts as a way of flirting with a man she does not know (nothing seen).

Families who see this movie should talk about Brecken Meyers’s statement that “Good things take time, but great things happen all at once.” Why does money make people take such foolish risks? Who were you rooting for? Why? Compare the amount at issue in this movie with the amount that people were racing for in “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.” Why is it so much more?

Families who see this movie will also enjoy “Airplane!,” “Top Secret,” and “Blazing Saddles” (all with some vulgar humor). And every family should watch “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

Jackie Chan has his best American movie role so far as Chon Wang, an imperial guard sent from China’s Forbidden City to Colorado’s Carson City to rescue a kidnapped Princess (Lucy Liu) in the old West of 1881. Along the way he meets Roy (Owen Wilson) a smooth-talking robber and con man, and they have various adventures that provide many opportunities for humor and many, many opportunities for fight scenes that show off Chan’s trademark fast, flashy, and funny footwork.

In classic buddy movie fashion, Roy and Chon begin as antagonists, and it takes them a while (and Roy’s finding out that there is gold involved) to figure out that they are on the same side. Chan and Wilson have a nice rapport and Wilson’s easy-going surfer style works very well with Chan’s more reserved approach. Liu is elegant and beautiful at home in the palace, spirited and honorable when she finds out that she has been kidnapped and that Chinese people are being used for slave labor. And of course the fight scenes are sensational, as Chan uses anything he can get his hands and feet on to help him vanquish all the bad guys.

A lot of younger kids will want to see this movie. Parents should know that the movie has some bad language, potty humor, scenes in a brothel, and drinking and drug use (portrayed humorously, including a prolonged drinking game and a drunken horse). The racism of the era is touched on. Chong is thrown out of a bar and he is very hurt when he overhears Roy agree with an anti-Chinese comment. The prostitutes are portrayed stereotypically, but the leading women in the movie are brave, smart, capable, and loyal.

Families who see this movie should talk about how Roy and Chong learn to trust each other and work together, how Chong uses quick thinking (and a good knowledge of basic physics) to use whatever he can find to help him fight the bad guys, and how people from many different cultures reacted to life in America. Families who enjoy this movie will enjoy Chan’s other films, especially “Mr. Nice Guy” and “Rumble in the Bronx.”

If attitude and very cool explosions were enough to make a movie worthwhile, then this one would win an Oscar. But movies generally require something along the lines of characters and plot, and there this movie lets us down.

John Travolta plays a mysterious bad guy named Gabriel Shear who will do anything to get what he wants. In this case, he wants the greatest hacker in the world, Stanley Jobson (Hugh Jackman), to help him steal a lot of money from a bank. We first see Gabriel talking about what’s wrong with Hollywood movies and describing his objections to “Dog Day Afternoon” (coincidentally the same movie Travolta quoted in “Saturday Night Fever”). It becomes apparent that this is not just some random conversation over drinks. We are in the middle of a very ugly hostage situation, far more menacing than the one in “Dog Day Afternoon.” He doesn’t just have the hostages strapped up in explosives. He has them strapped up in explosives and ball bearings, so that when one person explodes we will get to see the rain of spheres operating like a mini-minefield.

Then a flashback: Ginger (Halle Berry) finds Stanley working as a maintenance man at an oil rig, under probation that will send him to jail immediately if he touches a computer keyboard. She tells Stanley that her employer will pay $100,000 just to meet him, and Stanley, who wants to regain custody of his plucky daughter from his druggie porn star wife, accepts. They meet in the kind of nightclub/house of decadence that Hollywood types think that non-Hollywood types will think is cool. Gabriel gives Stanley a rather unusual test — 60 seconds to break into a Defense Department computer system while a gun is at his head and a woman is otherwise distracting him under the desk.

Many explosions and shoot-outs and car chases (plus a look at Halle Berry topless) later, we are back at the hostage scene, and ready for some very predictable twists and turns and a bus hanging from a helicopter before the unsurprising ending.

The dialogue is supposed to be hip and sardonic, but it is just third-rate Tarantino. When the Berry character says that her name is Ginger, the best they can do is have Stanley make a “Gilligan’s Island” joke. Generally speaking, when the characters in a movie laugh at a joke, the audience does not. The movie tries for a vibe that is cool, amoral, and ambiguous, but what it gets is a vibe that is manipulative and insincere. Really — they could not figure out a way to make us care about Stanley without making his daughter have a stepfather who makes porn movies and a mother who is too drugged out to pick her up from school on time? They throw in a little Jeremy Bentham-esque dialogue about the greatest good for the greatest number, but are we really supposed to be glad that national security is being carried out by a rogue cop who thinks he is above the rules? It’s like giving the codes to the atom bomb to Leona Helmsley.

Jackman and Berry do their best with criminally underwritten parts, but Travolta never makes us believe that his character has two dimensions, much less three. All that’s left are the explosions and chases which are well handled, but we care so little about the outcome that they barely matter.

Parents should know that this is a true R movie with very strong language, nudity, sexual references and situations (including using a woman like property and ordering her to service Stanley sexually in front of other people), and a lot of violence. Many people are killed and there is an extended close-up of a grisly corpse.

Families who see this movie should talk about the Bentham-esque conundrum posed by Gabriel. If you could wipe out cancer by killing one child, would you do it? Should Stanley have violated his parole and broken the law in order to get his daughter back? How is what he did when Ginger was being threatened make him different from Gabriel?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy “Face-Off” with Travolta and Nicolas Cage and “X-Men” with Jackman and Berry.

The grand tradition of “what if?” movies from “A Christmas Carol” to “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the more recent “Passions of Mind” and “Me Myself I” show us an unhappy hero or heroine who finds out what life would have been like if he or she had made a different choice. But in this version, Nicolas Cage plays Jack Campbell, a man who is perfectly delighted with his life the way it is. He loves money, making it on Wall Street and spending it on expensive suits, gourmet meals, and a snazzy sports car. He has an elegant, if somewhat sterile, apartment, decorated with expensive photographs of anonymous body parts. He doesn’t mind Scrooge-ily calling a meeting at the office on Christmas, telling himself it is for the employees’ own good, since they will be making so much money.

But then he stops to buy eggnog and sees a man (Don Cheadle) pull out a gun when a store clerk refuses to pay off his lottery ticket. His offer to buy the ticket mysteriously catapults him into the life he chose not to have — a life in the New Jersey suburbs, married to his college sweetheart (Tea Leoni), with two small children and a job selling tires. His old life has disappeared. It is his worst nightmare, and there will be many opportunities for him to be horrified by diapers and outlet store merchandise and completely deconstruct his old life before he begins to realize what he has missed.

Despite some predictability and some awkward construction — the movie feels as though it was edited heavily after focus group testing, leaving some characters and plot lines unresolved — the movie is a holiday pleasure. Cage and Leoni are enormously appealing in their various incarnations. There are some funny lines and warm moments, especially when the one person Jack cannot fool is his daughter, who knows this is not the Daddy she loves and decides he must be an alien. And there is a satisfying resolution that incorporates the best of both options.

Parents should know that the movie has some mature themes, including sexual references and situations. Jack is very nice to a woman he slept with, but it is clear that there is no intimacy between them. He and his wife start to have sex, but when he says something she finds inappropriate, she stops him. A woman suggests an affair, and Jack’s friend tells him that it would be disastrous: “Don’t screw up your whole life just because you’re a little unsure about who you are.” The movie does make it clear that loving, married sex is the ideal. Characters repeatedly turn to liquor to relieve stress, and a character makes a joke about his wife’s drinking. There is some strong language.

Families should talk about some of the “roads not taken” they still think about, and what they think their lives would be like now if they had made another choice. How do we make choices? What do we do when circumstances make choices for us? What do you think the angel will do for the young woman who accepted too much change?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Me Myself I.”

Somewhere, there are future Hollywood directors who will tell magazine feature writers that they first decided to make movies as they watched “Lord of the Rings.”

It is that good. It is that once-to-a-generation, not since “Star Wars,” transcendent reminder of why we tell stories, why we have imagination, and why we must go on quests to test our spirits and heal the world. And it is a story that invites us into a fully-realized world with many different civilizations, all so thoroughly imagined that we do not only believe that they each have complete languages, but that they have dictionaries, histories, mythologies, schools, music, and poetry.

Our hero, Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood), comes from one such culture. He is a Hobbit. And he is on a quest to return a powerful ring to the place where it was created, so it can be destroyed. A great wizard called Gandalf has told him that the ring can be the source of great evil. But of course this makes it very sought after by all kinds of scary folks, so Frodo has a lot of adventures ahead of him.

Peter Jackson, who directed and co-wrote the script, has created a movie that seems astonishingly inventive and new and at the same time somehow seems as though it always existed inside us. Every detail, from the tiniest plant to the hugest battle, is exactly, satisfyingly right. The bad guys, all thundering hooves and billowing capes, seem to have come from the core of every nightmare since the world began. All three movies in the series have already been shot, so we can expect his singular vision to carry us through to the end.

A couple of caveats — like Harry Potter, Frodo is a character who is more interesting on the page, where we can share his thoughts, than in a movie, where he is primarily called upon to look amazed, scared, or sad. And like Harry Potter, there were benefits to producing a series of films at the same time (continuity, commitment to getting all of the details right), but some drawbacks, too. So, we get glimpses of people who will be important later but now are somewhere between placeholders and distractions. I know they were there first, but I could not help thinking that all the women in the movie dress like Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks.

Parents should know that the movie might be overwhelming for younger children who are not familiar with the characters and story. I recommend preparing anyone younger than 12 with some background or encouraging them to read the simpler first story in the series, The Hobbit (about Frodo’s uncle, Bilbo). Characters are in severe peril and there are intense battle scenes.

Families who watch this movie should discuss why it is that only Frodo seems immune to the ring’s power to corrupt even honorable, wise, and powerful people and the notion that “even the smallest person can change the course of the earth.” If you were going to form a fellowship for a grand quest, who would you want to be in it?

Families who enjoy this movie should read the books, starting with the prequel, The Hobbit, with beautiful illustrations by Michael Hague. They may want to read more about New Zealand because its extraordinary topography provides the settings for Middle Earth or look at the gorgeously imaginative illustrations by Maxfield Parrish that inspired some of the art direction. They will also enjoy the “Star Wars” movies, Labyrinth, and Dark Crystal. I enthusiastically recommend the BBC audio version of the books, which might be just the thing to keep kids patient until the second movie in the trilogy opens up in December of 2002.