Dodgeball? Actually, Goofball

Rating: 6/10 (23 June 2004)

"Dodgeball" is going great guns at the box office as moviegoers with time on their hands in the summer and not enough first-rate flicks to see seek harmless, amusing entertainment that leaves little impression when the lights go on.
Ben Stiller is an evil gym owner with a high tech operation who covets neighboring Average Joe's place, owned by a kind but incompetent businessman named...Joe. That's Vince Vaughn. Stiller's wife in real life, Christine Taylor, shows up-she's a bank attorney checking out Joe's messed up or really non-existent financial records.
Average Joe's will be seized for non-payment of a mortgage and snarling, pumped up, hyper Stiller wants the place for a parking lot. $50,000 will save the day and just by coincidence that's the prize purse at the national dodgeball championship to be held in Las Vegas.
You know the rest. Average Joe puts together a team of first-class nudnicks to win the prize money while the Global Gym creep confidently plans to snag the championship with his menacing crew. Of course Kate the lawyer winds up on Average Joe's team having rejected the slimy advances of his rival. It's a nice role for Taylor who has appeared mostly in B- minus films despite her highly respected and too little known breakthrough performance in 1996's "Cat Swallows Parakeet and Speaks."
The best role is that of wheelchair-bound once great dodgeball champ Patches O'Houlihan, played with vulgar gusto by the aging but still fine Rip Torn.
Director Rawson Marshall Tucker knew how to make a box office hit-whether he can do anything seriously engrossing is another question. Actually it isn't.
Does girl (lawyer) get boy (Average Joe morphing into a hunk)? You didn't think a low brow comedy like this would skip the inevitable romance, did you? Well the ending surprised - and clearly upset (ha ha) - some of the parents in the theater.
Lance Armstrong and Chuck Norris do cameos with Armstrong flatly recounting his medical history. He can ride but he can't act.
Amusing, slight madcap sports film with some funny lines and some good physical comedy-that's all.
6/10.