Release Date: June 18, 2004
Starring: Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Christine Taylor, Justin Long, Stephen Root, Alan Tudyk, Rip Torn, Gary Cole, Jason Bateman
Directed by: Rawson Marshall Thurber
Written by: Rawson Marshall Thurber
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox Films
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (rude and sexual humor, language)
The best that can be said for Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, is that for once, Ben Stiller is not playing a geeky, neurotic Jewish guy. The rest of the film, a screwball comedy in which differences are settled (at last) by a good, old-fashioned game of dodgeball, lives up to expectations as hit or miss, with plenty of gross-out, slapstick jokes but little in the way of clever humor.
Fortunately it runs no more than 90 minutes, though that could have something to do with the bare-bones plot. When Peter LaFleur (Vince Vaughn), the owner of the financially instable Average Joe’s Gym, learns he has one month to pay off the $50,000 he owes to the bank, he and his friends enter an international dodgeball tournament in Las Vegas, hoping to use the prize money to pay off the debts.
Standing in his way is the musclebound dodgeball team from Globo Gym, a corporate fitness chain led by White Goodman (Stiller). To make matters worse, if Peter can’t come up with the cash, the bank will foreclose Average Joe’s, and White will be able to buy it out.
Dodgeball, which is directed and written by Rawson Marshall Thurber, has a number of sources to tap for its comedy, but the best is Stiller’s villain, White Goodman. He has the overdeveloped look of the ludicrously self-improved entrepreneurs hawking miracle workout videos and quickie ab gizmos on late-night infomercials. And his perfectly coifed mane and dirtball mustache go well with his twisted, nonsensical aphorisms (“Your gym is a skid mark on the underpants of society,” he tells LaFleur with blue-ribbon sneer, using his fingers to put air quotes around the word gym).
As the movie’s hero, Vaughn is bland as the lazy but good-natured everyman; he somehow manages to convince Kate Veatch (Christine Taylor, who is as repulsed by Stiller here as she was in Zoolander), the lawyer assigned to handle the foreclosure of Average Joe’s, to become a member of his dodgeball team despite a complete lack of personality. But Dodgeball is clearly more interested in poking fun at the oddball characters than taking the time to develop the genuine ones.
Indeed, LaFleur’s team is a bunch of misfits. There’s Justin (Justin Long), a teenager looking for some shred of dignity after an embarrassing attempt to make his high school’s cheerleading squad. Or Steve (Alan Tudyk), who thinks he’s a pirate. Or Gordon (Stephen Root, essentially doing a version of Milton, his character from Office Space), whose Asian mail-order bride gives him the finger from the sideline.
Then there’s Patches O’Houlihan (Rip Torn), a now-ancient, wheelchair-bound former dodgeball star who installs himself as the coach of the Average Joe’s team and insists on a training regimen involving hurling monkey wrenches at his players. “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball,” he gurgles.
In fact, most of Dodgeball’s humor is based on the premise that watching unsuspecting human beings getting pasted with flying objects is inherently funny. While there is a certain visceral glee to it, the act quickly gets old. Likewise for the parade of farfetched teams, like the flannel-clad Lumberjacks or half-naked Kamikazes, that LaFleur and company face off against in the tournament.
The dodgeball itself -- which is reduced to a series of quickly edited shots of some people throwing balls and others getting creamed from all angles -- is mediocre at best; like most sports on film, it is not particularly photogenic. Fortunately there is a pair of television announcers, Cotton McKnight (Gary Cole) and Pepper Brooks (Jason Bateman), covering the event for ESPN8 (“The Ocho”). Cole’s act is a spot-on parody of the deep-timbred play-by-play men on sports television, while Bateman, as Pepper, continually chimes in with comically obvious color commentary (“With the blindfold on, he will not be able to see very well,” he remarks, in utter seriousness).
Would that all of this movie could have been as clever as them. Instead, it’s a typical slapdash screwball comedy: physical humor, gross-out jokes, oddball characters, abbreviated running time, and, oh yes, a handful of cameos. At least the producers can’t be accused of false advertising, because Dodgeball is one of those movies that is exactly what it looks like.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)