A Funny Bit Of Comic Stupidity

Rating: 7/10 (8 July 2004)

I have no awful memories of dodgeball and I will have no awful memories of 'Dodgeball'. I had fun playing this simplest of school games and had fun breezing through this goof-fest of a movie. As the cliche goes, it's good for a laugh. Actually, it's good for plenty of laughs and that's far more than I can say for most joke-free comedies. It's five sticks of foolish fun. I don't know how they pulled it off, though, because this ridiculous material has no right to be as enjoyable as it is, especially since you know where it's heading from the opening credits. Cliches or not, the filmmakers make it work.
Slacker Peter La Fleur (Vince Vaughn) owns a dive of a gym called Average Joe's. Muscle-twit White Goodman (Ben Stiller) owns the massive Globo Gym and intends to buy up La Fleur's business. To raise the $50,000 needed to pay the mortgage, a handful of members at Average Joe's enter a dodgeball tournament in Vegas. The jealous Goodman gathers super-jocks together to enter the same tourney. The lovely Christine Taylor (Kate Veach) is the third point of a humourous love triangle, who also proves to be a whiz playing the title game. Apart from a few twists and turns, the story follows the well-worn 'Rocky' path. It even takes some gentle jabs at the formula.
This flick proves once again that pratfalls are funny. Watching La Fleur's clumsy chums get pegged with red balls during Rip Torn's brutal training sessions, writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber treks to the well...but never goes there once too often. Stiller's insecure character hammers the same note, but he's still pretty funny in a very obnoxious role. Vaughn is about as relaxed as a piece of lunch meat, which goes against his usual high-strung style. The supporting cast members (including Stephen Root, who will always be Bill from "King Of The Hill" to me) don't leap past the stars, even though they all get to shine with lots of nerdy moments of comic stupidity.
What I found surprising is that many of the laughs hit you in the face a beat or two later. I expected that a movie with such obvious intentions would play all its cards right in front of you, but many of the jokes work best as rebounders and asides. Stiller and Vaughn must have called in some favours to get all the guest stars to do a cameo---some of them are great and some are unnecessary. In any case, 'Dodgeball' is a hoot without being a manic "throw everything at the wall" type comedy. There's nothing wrong with that, unless you hated the game as a kid. Then again, considering this is a "true underdog story", maybe inept dodgeballers can enjoy it too.