Eccentric hotel
tycoon Donald Sinclair devises a game to entertain the
high rollers who visit his
Las Vegas casino. He arranges for six competitors to race the to
Silver City, New Mexico, where $2 million is in a railway station locker. Sinclair's guests place bets on who will win. The racers consist of ne'er-do-well brothers Duane and Blaine Cody, businesswoman Merrill Jennings and her mother Vera, disgraced football referee Owen Templeton,
Jewish tourist Randy Pear and his family,
narcoleptic Italian tourist Enrico Pollini and no-nonsense attorney Nick Schaffer. Having initially agreed not to play, greed takes over and they start to race. Duane and Blaine destroy the airport's radar, grounding everybody else, but wrecking their own vehicle in the process so they rent another. They decide to split up to better their chances and have a locksmith create a duplicate locker key, but the locksmith overhears their plan and instead makes off with the key in a hot air balloon. The brothers catch up to him after a wild goose chase, leaving him and a stray cow hanging from the balloon's anchor rope. Later, after Blaine is distracted by two attractive women driving beside them on the road, they veer off of it and their rental car is crushed by a
monster truck, which they steal. Merrill and Vera are given malicious directions by a woman selling squirrels as pets on the side of the road, and crash into a pile of other totaled vehicles containing her previous deceased victims. After venturing through the
Mojave Desert, they steal a
rocket car until it runs out of fuel. Left disoriented due to the car's extreme speed, they then accidentally stumble onto a busload of mental patients headed for Silver City. Owen is kicked out of a taxi for a bad call he made at a football game that caused the driver to lose a bet. Now without most of his clothes or other belongings, he then dupes and impersonates the driver of a bus on the way to transport a large group of
Lucille Ball cosplayers to a convention, much to his dismay. After the cosplayers flood the bus with suds, he later hits the cow dangling from the balloon and crashes the bus. After the cosplayers lose the only spare wheel, Owen reveals that he is not the real driver and the enraged women chase him down the road. He steals a horse to escape. Randy forces his daughter Kimberly to
defecate out of the window of their mini-van to avoid stopping; as revenge, she insists they visit a museum dedicated to
Nazi officer
Klaus Barbie, mistakenly believing it to be about
Barbie the doll. The family awkwardly leaves the museum and steals
Adolf Hitler's staff car after Duane and Blaine sabotage their mini-van. On the road, they are attacked by an all-female
biker gang. Randy, who burns his tongue after the dashboard cigarette lighter accidentally ejects directly into his mouth, drives them into a large gathering honoring
World War II veterans and bumps his upper lip on the steering wheel, leaving a mark. The veterans are horrified by his Hitler-esque slurred speech and appearance, and one attempts to kill him. Later at a diner when his family insist they end the trip, Randy slips sleeping pills into their milkshakes and bundles them into a semi-truck heading for Silver City. Nick chooses not to participate, but changes his mind when he meets Tracy, an independent pilot who gives him a lift in her helicopter. She decides to visit her boyfriend, Shawn, on the way, who she finds cheating on her with another woman, Charleen, in his backyard, so she attacks him by using the helicopter to chase him into the desert. Now having damaged her helicopter and with police on the way to arrest them, she and Nick steal her ex-boyfriend's truck together and form a romantic relationship on their journey. Enrico is more excited by the race than the money, but falls asleep standing up in the hotel lobby, only waking hours later. He gets a ride from Zack, an ambulance driver delivering a transplant heart, who offers Enrico a lift in order to avoid a lawsuit from
Gloria Allred, who witnessed Zack hit him with his van. Enrico inadvertently drops the heart out of the window, whereupon it is stolen by a stray dog, which is then electrocuted on an
electric fence. Deeming the heart unusable, Zack plans to kill Enrico, who has no family or friends, to replace the missing heart. However, Enrico escapes by jumping onto a passing train, where he drops his locker key in a baby's diaper and, while retrieving it, is mistaken for a pedophile by the parents. He is thrown out at Silver City Station and is the first to reach the locker, only to fall asleep before opening it. The racers reunite in Silver City and fight to open the locker, only to find it empty. Outside, Sinclair's assistant, Harold Grisham, and call girl, Vicki, are making off with the money. The locksmith, still attached to the runaway balloon, suddenly appears and maneuvers it to drop the cow on Grisham and Vicki. He then ties the money bag to the balloon, but it slips out of his grip and into the sky. The racers chase the balloon to a
charity concert where
Smash Mouth is performing, and the band and crowd mistake the money for a donation. Once the racers see what a global difference the money could make, they have a change of heart and decide to donate it all. Sinclair and his patrons arrive at the scene and Nick horrifies them by announcing they will match the money raised. Sinclair is distraught as the donations total shoots past $19 million, and the racers celebrate by dancing and
crowd-surfing to "
All Star". ==Cast==