more laughs in one episode of South Park

Rating: 5/10 (11 June 2004)

Baseketball starts out pretty well, with some funny gags, and I had high hopes for it for perhaps the first 10 minutes. But 20 minutes in I was just feeling bored. It would get a few good laughs in, then there'd be a dead spot for a few minutes, then some other funny stuff. After half an hour I thought I'd see what people had said here, and people said it was sick and hilarious and outrageous, so I thought, maybe the sick outrageous stuff is just around the corner, and watched another 40 unexceptional minutes. Then I gave up, even though there was less than half an hour left. I just felt I was wasting my time.
Besides not being especially funny, this is also a very poorly conceived movie. The baseketball premise isn't especially bad, but after showing the amusing process of creating it there's not really any place to go except the lame, purposely cliched plot that unfolds. The movie is also a little too enamored of its stars. Why are they the only ones able to do really creative psyche-outs? There are no other clever practical jokers in the entire world except these two guys?
This attempt at Airplane-style humour has about 40 minutes of material stretched out to an hour and a half. A lot of people seem to like it, but it's really pretty tepid.