Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby opened in cinemas on August 4, 2006, turning NASCAR spectacle into one of the decade's most quotable comedies.
Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, fresh off Anchorman, built Ricky Bobby as a champion who prays over a table full of fast food brand names and gets undone by his own overconfidence, then set him against Sacha Baron Cohen's rival driver from Formula One, Jean Girard.
The film holds a 72% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 66 on Metacritic, solid marks for a broad studio comedy, and the loosest, funniest stretches still come from the improvised scenes between Ferrell and John C. Reilly as his best friend, Cal Naughton Jr.
Two decades on, it reads less as a NASCAR satire than as a study of a certain kind of confident American mediocrity, a theme McKay would return to more seriously in his later political films.
