Film Friday: Cannonball
November 14, 2025
Peter Hughes
Peter Hughes makes the case for a forgotten schlock classic.
Everybody’s seen The Cannonball Run, the 1981 Brock Yates-penned all-star romp loosely based on the very real coast-to-coast outlaw race that Yates organized in the ’70s as a middle finger to the federal 55-mph speed limit (he memorably won in a Ferrari Daytona shared with Dan Gurney).
Fewer people perhaps remember 1976’s Cannonball, and that’s a shame. A decidedly lower-budget and less star-studded affair, Cannonball reunited director Paul Bartell with an unmistakably well-endowed David Carradine in an attempt to recapture the magic of the previous year’s Death Race 2000.
Apparently not much of a car guy, Bartell took the job anyway, and kept himself interested by sprinkling cameos by his Hollywood friends throughout, most notably a scene where an uncredited and pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone appears alongside Martin Scorsese with the two of them playing mafia henchmen. (In one of the movie’s funniest recurring bits, Bartell himself plays a campy gambling impresario-cum-wannabe lounge singer.)
Don’t let the “not a car guy” thing fool you, though. Cannonball is dumb, outrageous fun, but it’s also a glorious artifact of ’70s car culture. Impressively, many of its portrayals of period performance are spot-on, from a wildly fishtailing Pantera to a Corvette that can’t muster a trace of oversteer to save its life. A pair of notably unbeflaming-chickened Trans Ams are the stars here, bolstered by a villainous late-’60s Charger and a Bullitt-esque Mustang of similar vintage that bails out our hero when his Pontiac bites the dust. A giant and progressively-more-destroyed Lincoln and all-female-crewed custom Chevy van round out the field, along with a K5 Blazer that gets an unsanctioned assist from the film’s most notable aeronautical cameo—Super Guppy!
Ignore the cavalier approach to continuity, the at times laughable acting, the fact 98% of this coast-to-coast race from L.A. to New York seems to take place in California—indeed, in the world of this movie, California stretches from Santa Monica to the George Washington Bridge—and the utter ridiculousness of it all.
It’s actually very easy to overlook all of this, because you’ll be laughing so hard the entire time. The film’s climax, a seemingly endless freeway pileup that escalates into a crescendo of violence, chaos, and completely inexplicable and ever-larger explosions, had me gasping for air.
Of course middle-brow hack Roger Ebert gave this thing one star. At once deeply stupid and profoundly brilliant, Cannonball is an overlooked gem, and one of the greatest car movies ever made.
Alloy Official Rating: 5 unsecured gas cans
One response to “Film Friday: Cannonball”
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The 55 mph speed limit is no laughing matter. Free Jimmy Carter!
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