Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)June 21st, 2004
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If you simply can't wait for Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy to be released, 2004's umpteenth Ben Stiller comedy might just tide you over until July 2. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story shares a lot of Anchorman's cast, as well as its unnecessarily colonified titled. But hey - if colons are your thing, then you should have a blast watching Dodgeball because a lot of time and care is spent implying there's a rampant fruitiness going on whenever men work out together. And that makes me giggle.
Dodgeball also pits Starsky & Hutch's antagonist against half of that film's titular combo. Vince Vaughn is Peter LaFleur, the owner of a failing, crumbling, old-school gym named Average Joes, which is located next door to a mucho-successful fitness center run by an egomaniac named White Goodman (Ben Stiller). The purposely cliché-riddled story finds Peter needing to secure $50,000 to stave off a foreclosure that will see White take over his business in less than a month.
One of Average Joes' regulars - they're all pinheads, pansies or pirates - suggests they compete in an international dodgeball tournament and use its $50,000 grand prize to save the gym. Enter every hackneyed sports bromide this side of The Bad New Bears. Yes, a woman (Stiller's wife, Christine Taylor) stokes the rivalry between Peter and White. Yes, the Average Joes are huge underdogs; and yes, they perform better than anyone expects, thanks to the input from a grizzled dodgeball veteran (Rip Torn). Yes, Peter's team ends up facing the Purple Cobras - a group of White's ringers - in the final round (why don't the Big Rivals ever meet in, say, the quarterfinals of sports flicks?); and yes, they win and save the gym. Hope I didn't ruin anything for you.
Dodgeball is all about absurd, lowbrow but mostly inoffensive humor. Personally, I could watch a guy taking a wrench to the face or a ball to the groin for 90 minutes every day of the week. Whether or not you could, however, is likely to determine if Dodgeball might be worth a trip to the theatre. This ain't Shakespeare, though some of the gay references are nearly as subtle (others, like when a Purple Cobra shrieks for a teammate to "ball" him, are not). Dodgeball was written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber, the creator of the Terry Tate, Office Linebacker character, which should give you some point of reference when it comes to this film's type of humor...the kind I like.
Dodgeball does lose some cred points for being too similar to Best in Show, BASEketball, and to a lesser extent, You Got Served, and Drumline in that it 's a movie about insanely dedicated athletes who compete in what is considered - at best - a fringe sport in real life. Add the fact that Dodgeball's third act features a mismatched pair of television broadcasters (Gary Cole and Jason Bateman, channeling Show's Jim Piddock and Fred Willard), and the comparison becomes even more glaring. Another complaint: Is Stiller capable of playing anything other than Nervous Nebbish (Along Came Polly, Envy, Meet the Parents, etc.) or its polar opposite, Scary, Extroverted Moron (Zoolander, Heavyweights, Happy Gilmore, etc.)? And speaking of Heavyweights, isn't this the exact same part? I'm as tired of Stiller (this is his fourth major release in less than six months this year - and he has at least a couple more in the hopper for '04) as I am hearing about Linday Lohan's breasts.
I said "hearing about," not "looking at."
1:30 - PG-13 for rude and sexual humor, and language
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