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| Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
Directed By: Rawson Marshall Thurber Plot
Summary - Review 1 - Review
2 - CURRENT REVIEWS
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| A group of misfits enter a Las Vegas dodgeball tournament in order to save their cherished local gym from the onslaught of a corporate health fitness chain. [TRAILER] Commitment. "Dogeball: A True Underdog Story" is committed to its premise, its characters and its gags so thoroughly that one cannot help but smirk. Its title alone plays into this ploy, promising an uplifting story of underdogs having their day. It is a stupid little offensive comedy, contrasting the typical look and feel of a sports story with the pathetic saps who inhabit this story. And it is in this disparity where the film's abundant humor emerges.
The premise is straight-forward. White Goodman (Ben Stiller) is the buffed-up, hyper-macho, gallivanting owner of an up-scale sports club. He helps you get fit and repeats, through advertisements and announcements, that "we're better than you, and we know it!" Peter (Vince Vaughn) is the toned-down, ordinary schmo who runs "Average Joe's," a simple fitness club that finds itself in trouble with the bank, and in desperate need of $50,000. Without it, the bank forecloses and sells the deed to, who else, White.
As one might gather from the title, Peter and his friends realize the only way to get that money will be to enter a dodgeball tournament with a $50,000 top prize - a tournament that will eventually pit Peter's team against White's, who joins the competition purely to humiliate Peter.
There is a romantic interest. Of course, in a movie with this much testosterone, there must be an object to drool over and an object to compete for. In this incarnation it is Kate (Christine Taylor), who starts on White's side as a banker hired to close down Average Joe's, but then joins Peter's side as the greased-up, arrogant and disgusting White starts to put the moves on her.
I laughed a lot at this movie, and this fact alone must trump any other analysis. For better or worse, it made me laugh and I must be honest about that. Looking back over the film's construction, I think there are five key ingredients for comedies of this ilk that influence the success of their overall recipe. First, start with a group of immature male friends, sprinkle in some obligatory women who fall head over heals for the main characters, add just a pinch of a creative competition, contest or quest, mix in a healthy bit of chemistry and then stir it all up with an evil foe that is equally memorable, outlandish and exaggerated.
Remembering just a few titles off the top of my head, I see this pattern in a number of comedies from recent years. I thought "Old School" was only somewhat successful because, while it had the chemistry, its evil dean was not very unique and the main mission of the movie - to start a frat for losers - was not particularly creative. However, I loved "Office Space" and "Dumb and Dumber." In the former you had the unique satire of office life and, of course, the memorable Lumbergh to push the group of average tech geeks around. In the latter, you had the ripe chemistry of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, the hysterics of their road trip and the buffoonish hitmen out to get them.
Well, in "Dodgeball," all else revolves around the hilarious chemistry of Vaughn and Stiller. I have always been a fan of Vaughn. He plays characters that are bitingly sarcastic, and he is always the sort of character who will speak his mind, even if it's socially unacceptable. Stiller is so arrogant and so stupid that one is reminded of his performance in "Zoolander." The difference though between that film and this one is White's aggressiveness, his adversarial nature and his misguided belief that he is superior and intimidating. Stiller plays White seriously, as if he's not in on the joke, and that makes both his steroids-induced strut, his terrible one-liners and the reactions of Peter and his cohorts that much more hilarious.
Per the recipe cited above, Kate fills a rather predictable void in the story as the lead female interest, but I also took note that she is not the stereotypical helpless woman. She is, in fact, the best dodgeball player in the film and Peter's team would go nowhere without her. So yes, she falls for the guys and is referred to as if she was a car or a video game, but she's a D- on the respect scale, not an F.
The remainder of the cast does an admirable job of propping up the film's down moments. Naturally, in Peter's crew are the dork, the geek, the fat man and, in a notable deviation, the man who thinks he's a pirate. White's right-hand-man is Me'Shell (Jamal Duff), another overly-masculine, but strangely homoerotic fitness nut who serves as the film's twist on the thug-for-hire. The most bizarre character, and the winner for this year's "was-it-good-or-was-it-just-pathetic" award is Rip Torn as Patches O'Houlihan, the dodgeball legend from long ago and drunk in the present, who helps Peter's team prepare for competition in, shall we say, unconventional ways.
But the film is a winner, in the context of its genre, due to its commitment to creating an entire world around the grade-school sport of dodgeball. The premise alone is hilarious, reducing grown men to a child's game and rallying around a sport where we get to see confident, assured adults beat down by rubber balls. But beyond the premise we are given an instructional video, a hilarious teacher in O'Houlihan and the equally-preposterous championship competition complete with broadcast commentators, a championship court and the pumped-up melodrama that one would typically only associate with the Super Bowl or the World Series.
And the prevailing seriousness of this world is the constant third person in "Dodgeball" that Vaughn and Stiller can then play off of and toy with. The dumb frat premise in "Old School" did not give its stars much to work with. But in this world of dodgeball practices, psych-outs and competition, we never really have time to get bored.
Well, except maybe once. There is a moment, just before the championship game, when Peter's team members experience some struggles and when some of them decide to leave the team. It is here where the film's complete lack of depth or substance becomes painfully apparent. We don't care about any of these characters, or about the fate of the "team," and could really care less if they win or lose.
Instead, we patiently wait for the problems to get sorted out so that we can get back on to that dodgeball court, and find our way back to the laughs.
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