Starts and ends well but there simply aren't enough laughs in between

Rating: 4/10 (6 February 2016)

Peter LaFleur (Vince Vaughan) is the owner of Average Joe's Gym which is located next to Globo Gym which is a much larger multi-chain gym owned by obnoxious and self-obsessed White Goodman (Ben Stiller). When LaFleur discovers that he has 30 days to pay off $50,000 he panics and his first attempt at raising some quick cash fails. One of the members of his gym sees an advert in a magazine advertising a Dodgeball competition and the prize for winning the competition is $50,000. Seeing this as being their only option to earn that amount of cash in the time frame required, LaFleur and his gym members form a team and get trained by former Dodgeball champion Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn). However, when Goodman gets wind that LaFleur is entering into the Dodgeball championship he assembles his own crack team and enters the competition himself to win the money and put an end to LaFleur's hopes of saving his gymnasium.
The start of the film is quite impressive with Stiller's monologue being a parody of the sort of thing that you'd expect to see on Teleshopping or QVC. This aspect is funny as I myself don't take a lot of what these channels say seriously and I can see that this was the effect that was trying to be achieved here. The film then shifts focus on to Vaughan and it's clear to see that he's a pleasant enough person, but clearly has no idea how to run a business. The problems for me started when the film started to establish the actual plot....
Once the plot kicks in then it becomes fairly obvious that writer and director Rawson Marshall Thurber has gone for very easy targets in order to generate laughs (most of the 'laughs' on offer here stem from seeing people being hit with a ball). OK you may argue that it's a film about Dodgeball and that's the point. Fair enough... I would expect some of the laughs to stem from this, but surely a better scripted film would have us laughing at the characters for what they say as well as what they do. I'm not a fan of comedies that seem to just rely on physical humour as I think it's lazy and sadly this really is a lazy film. The characters all fall into the usual clichés with Thurber deciding that one of them should act like a pirate all the time which was never funny and grew more annoying as time passed.
The performances from Stiller and Vaughan weren't brilliant if we're honest; the former overacts most of the time and crosses the line between being funny and being annoying on almost every occasion. Vaughan fares slightly better as his performance feels more natural, but I still felt that he underplayed his role slightly meaning that I couldn't engage with him as a character quite as much as I should have done.
The final sequence of events seems to thrown in every single cliché in the book and all of these events lead to a fairly safe and predictable ending - barring one surprise that LaFleur has for Goodman which I'll admit was pretty funny (I liked that as I do like the idea of the little people getting the better of the big people).
All in all then Dodgeball is a fairly forgettable film with a fairly standard story which aims for cheap laughs far too often. For me, an underdog story will always have some merit, but the truth is that Dodgeball is too basic and just simply isn't funny enough.