Dodgeballtastic!

Rating: 8/10 (19 June 2004)

Sure, the very concept of making a movie about dodgeball, and one with a good chunk of it devoted to watching people play dodgeball, sounds like one of the most asinine ideas ever conceived for a movie, but then again movies have also been made about a duck from a parallel universe with a duck-themed version of the earth coming to the regular human-version of the earth and the ensuing culture clash, adaptations of terrible 60's cartoons about prehistoric blue-collar families or an idiotic group of teenagers, their rascally dog, and their fabulous van solving mysteries involving haunted amusement parks, as well as one about a guy and girl who have a tormented relationship and undergo a futuristic form of treatment to have each other erased from their memories, only to eventually get back together, and repeat the process over and over again. Alright, that last one was swell, as is Dodgeball, the little dodgeball movie that could. For a movie about what this movie is about, it couldn't possibly be any better. It's one of those rare comedies that maintains a strong level of laughs all the way through, many of them being of the best kind, the random, unexpected bizarro gags that always drive audiences wild! Why anyone would think the vastly inferior BASEKETBALL is better than this is beyond me. While both are spoofs of traditional sports movies, Dodgeball tells a real story with real characters we root for and in some cases, especially in the case of Steve the Pirate and Patches O'Houlihan, that we haven't seen before.
BASEKETBALL, on the other hand, is just bits of pieces of other spoof movies, with no real creative pulse of its own, and a result, despite the sterling work of master actor Bob Costas, is wildly uneven, and after about ten minutes or so, pretty damn boring.
Where Dodgeball flies by with its own goofy sense of itself, BASEKETBALL plods, taking us on a lame journey to nowhere particularly interesting. If you like your movies watered down and half-assed, (the game of BASEKETBALL, the basis of the movie, isn't particularly funny, and doesn't even make much sense), then BASEKETBALL is the one for you, or just watch MAJOR LEAGUE or any of its sequels, which are more or less the same movie, and are just about as uneven and not worth your time. If you want to have a good time, and laugh hard and often, then go with DODGEBALL.