Dodgeball - A True Underdog Story DVD > Reviews > The Five D's of Dodgeball

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Loved it
Story	Satisfactory
Characters / Performances	Good
Special Effects	Good
How does it compare to similar films?	Good

Advantages:	Endlessly quotable, great if you have a nasty sense of humour .  .  .
Disadvantages:	awful if you don't .  No plot, no character development

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

If Peter La Fleur can’t repay his mortgage in thirty days, his arch-enemy White Goodman will bulldoze his gym and turn it into a car park. His only hope is a Las Vegas Dodgeball tournament. But with his team of misfits, he doesn’t seem to have a hope of winning…

So what is dodgeball? Essentially it is an evil pseudo-sport that American teenagers are forced to play in PE. It involves throwing football-sized rubber balls at the opposing team’s heads and bodies, knocking them out of the game or their senses. It proves that gym teachers really hate their students and that Americans will call anything a sport.

Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber has taken a wafer-thin concept, stripped out character development, all but the basic plot and smothered the whole thing with all manner of politically incorrect jokes. It should be incredibly offensive and it is, but I couldn’t stop laughing. The story is simple; the little guys (Average Joe’s Gym) versus the evil corporate might of Globo Gym (Motto: We’re better than you and we know it). It’s your standard sports movie fare, including the A to B plotting, training sequences and inevitable outcome. But Thurber has brought together the cream of the comedy crop, who give the roles their all. It’s not a subtle film and most of the comedy derives from a sense of Schadenfreude (finding joy in others’ misery). Let me put it this way – if you’ve ever laughed at someone falling flat on their face, you’ll wet yourself watching this. Dodgeball itself is a pointless sport that glories in the pain of its participants and Thurber plays it up, with dozens of shots of people being hit extremely hard in the face and crotch. Of the rest of the film, one third is pitch perfect character comedy from the likes of Ben Stiller and Rip Torn and the remaining third is a series of well-timed gags, most of which are very un-PC. Targets include gym fanatics, steroid abusing athletes, Germans, the Japanese, inner city kids, cod philosophical sports commentators, fat people, lesbians, mail-order brides, sado-masochists, lumberjacks and girl scouts. So if you fall into any of those categories and are easily (or rightfully) offended by any mention of it, you probably won’t enjoy this film. If however, you believe anything and anyone is fair game, this could be your cup of tea.

In comedy circles, Ben Stiller is the man of the moment. He makes big box office whether he’s doing character comedy, romantic comedies or playing hapless everymen. In White Goodman he has created a monstrous and monstrously funny egotist; a combination of Derek Zoolander and Mr Furious from “Mystery Men”, being stupid, vain, crass and quick to anger. He looks funny for a kick off, with a highlighted bouffant blonde mullet and a porn star moustache to compliment his lycra-clad body that is so muscular he looks like he’s made from knotted rope. Add to that a peacock strut and a good line in endlessly quotable stupidity and you’ve got a recipe for comedy success. (“Ugliness and fatness are genetic disorders…Much like baldness and necrophilia.” And “I’m going to turn you from Frankenstein to Franken-fine.”) Yes it’s a caricature, but it’s damned funny.

Vince Vaughn plays it straight as Peter La Fleur, the owner of Average Joe’s Gym. La Fleur is a two-dimensional nice guy, who lets his clients off without paying gym fees and breaks up fights and of course he’s poorly organised and in financial trouble. Vaughn has worked with Stiller before, so has had plenty of practice keeping a straight face. He’s also got a great deal of charm, so is the ideal foil to Stiller’s excesses and really gets you rooting for him and his band of misfits.

Christine Taylor (a.k.a. Mrs Ben Stiller) puts in a sparky turn as tax lawyer Kate Veatch, the object of Goodman’s lust and La Fleur’s affections. She’s mainly there to react to the other characters so doesn’t get many good lines, although she has one great scene where she puts Stiller in an arm-lock and her comic timing overall is very good.

Rip Torn gets all the best lines as wheelchair-bound former dodgeball champion Patches O’Houlihan. He spends most of the film abusing La Fleur’s team either physically (throwing spanners at them, saying “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball!”) or verbally, labelling them “as useful as a cock-flavoured lollipop”. It’s a perverse role from a respected actor, who clearly relishes being so wilfully offensive.

La Fleur’s team is made up a of a series of oddballs; Justin is a teenage loser trying to bulk up to win the heart of a cheerleader, Gordon is a stickler for rules whose mail-order bride hates him, Owen is a vacant drip, who can’t throw or catch a ball to save his life, Dwight is Pete’s embittered employee and Steve the Pirate is a man, who believes he’s a pirate, oddly enough. With the exception of the latter, all are played straight, to hilarious effect. Steve the Pirate is obviously a send-up of Johnny Depp’s hamtastic turn in “Pirates of the Caribbean” by Alan Tudyk, who “gaarrrs” his way merrily through the first two-thirds of the movie, before abruptly disappearing, for no apparent reason. Maybe he had to do re-shoots for “I, Robot” or something.

Of the Globo Gym team, Missi Pyle as Fran and Jamal Duff as Me’Shell stand out. She because she is a) virtually unrecognisable (she played Jane Doe in “Galaxy Quest”) and b) hideous beyond all reason! He stands out mainly because he towers above everyone else, certainly having presence, if not the lines to back it up. Other characters to look out for are the perfectly paired sports commentators. Gary Coleman is the journeyman reporter with a nice line in cod mystical mutterings and great timing (“Las Vegas; a city built on sand, broken dreams and five dollar lobster”) and Jason Bateman is the young funky one who repeats the tail end of his colleague’s sentences, without understanding them. There are also plenty of high kitsch value cameos from the likes of Chuck Norris, William Shatner, David Hasselhof and Lance Armstrong.

The film’s production values are surprisingly high considering that this is a movie that probably started as an idea scrawled on a beer mat. The jokes come thick and fast and the comedy is ramped up by the judicious use of editing. There are plenty of nice touches throughout the film that show us the director has put a lot of thought into it and is well aware of how daft the whole thing is. These include a fifties’ educational film on the joys of dodgeball, allegedly made by the Über-American Corporation, featuring Hank Azaria as the young Patches, a reference to the infamous pie scene from “American Pie” and the words “Deus Ex Machina” written on the inside of a treasure chest. The movie is book-ended by commercials for the two gyms, which neatly sum up the attitudes of the opposing teams. Although if you are willing to sit through the credits, there is an extra scene involving Ben Stiller’s character ranting about the outcome and doing something grotesque to the backing of “Milkshake” by Kelis, which is hilarious.

The thing that carries the whole film is the overwhelming sense of glee that pervades the whole production. It is neither subtle nor sensitive and should be avoided by all those who think political correctness is the best thing to have happened to the world. However, if you want to laugh at stupid people playing a stupid game and getting repeatedly injured, then this is the film of the year. To be taken with a bucket of popcorn and a large pinch of salt.