"Dodgeball" - A true underdog story?

Rating: 8/10 (31 August 2005)

"Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story" is hardly true in the sense that its plot line is based on an actual event or time in history. "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story" is only "true" in that dodgeball is slowly rising to the top of the "almost sports" world (presumably through the underground avenue of word-of-mouth) and what's more, a movie is made about dodgeball and it's directed by first-timer Rawson Marshall Thurber.
My own experiences in gymnasium dodgeball were all short-lived in the annals of elementary school, as like most others surprised by the massive success of this picture last summer, dodgeball, or Extreme Dodgeball as it's called on sports channel ESPN, is close to earning a place in the most-watched sports arena on television. Whoa.
But in the movie "Dogdeball: A True Underdog Story," hapless, borderline bankrupt Average Joe's Gym owner Peter La Fleur (Vince Vaughn) comes up with a scheme to win $50,000 in order to save his fledgling business. Actually, he doesn't come up with the plan himself; one of his equally hapless, bizarr-o but loyal gym regulars reads about dodgeball in "Obscure Sports Quarterly."
The catch is, they have all heard of and know how to play dodgeball, but they don't know how to play (play is italicized) dodgeball. As with any sport, officially sanctioned or not, there are rules and any advice that Peter and his cohorts come across is therefore invaluable if they are to get anywhere in the upcoming dodgeball tournaments being held in Las Vegas. And so with much pondering, a loose team is formed out of true societal misfits including a pirate, a wannabe cheerleader, and a guy who's never been on a date.
One of them borrows a documentary sports video from 1938, and it features legendary titan of the game Patches O'Houlihan (played by Hank Azaria in the video, a wheelchair-bound Rip Torn in the present). Soon enough, Patches rolls into Average Joe's and shows these 'dogs how to play some dodgeball in some very effective if not totally kosher techniques. Peter realizes that lawyer Kate Veatch (Christine Taylor), who has served him with the bank's foreclosure warnings and also gets wind of some of his lackadaisical business practices including letting his clients pay their own way, has a mutual disliking of White Goodman (a delightfully obnoxious, egomaniacal, and scene-chewing Ben Stiller), the owner of Globo Gym, and eventually asks her to join their team.
Of course, she's at first reluctant but after White gets her fired from her job with the bank, she is left with little choice but to join at least in part to get revenge on White. White Goodman is another one of those deliciously manic, comic villains that Stiller specializes in, chewing up scenery nearly every second the camera's focused on him. He forms his own dodgeball team, the Purple Cobras (who all look like action movie rejects, even though one of them is from an obscure place in the former Soviet Union), and with the sports winnings, he aims to buy out Peter's gym and then demolish it (with them still in it) but they're obviously not going away without a fight.
This is a movie that finally acknowledges its place as a wild, out-of-place, and self-referential sports comedy. No phony theatrics here, ladies and gentlemen, just a bunch of actors who know the material inside-out and look to make one hell of an entertaining picture. Vince Vaughn does his best to keep the plot on track with a cool game face and succeeds but Ben Stiller is a total maniac as White Goodman. Like the corporate fitness monster he played in "Heavyweights" (1995), he's totally insane but goes a step further into playing a character who if it weren't for a shred of brains in that thick melon on top of his shoulders, would be a poster child for self-absorbed fitness gurus everywhere.
Most entertaining are the actual dodgeball sequences, which eat up most of the film's second half. These are fast, brutal, and unflinching in showing various team members getting annihilated on the court with zingers to the face, to the crotch or any exposed area. It almost makes you want to sign up and form your own team and compete in Vegas.
"Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story" is an eager film from an equally ambitious team of filmmakers. It put a smile on my face, as any other sports film of similar theme would not have been able to do that. Sure it's silly, but the laughs are such that you won't be kicking yourself afterward for doing so.
"Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story" - Don't dodge it. Oh, wait, catch it. Ahh, screw this, watch this movie, turn your brain off, and enjoy it.
8/10