A good silly movie that is everything "Anchorman" should have been.

Rating: 8/10 (9 May 2005)

When I heard of "Anchorman," I thought the premise was inspired, and with its cast I was sure it would be a great stupid, silly comedy. Unfortunately it turned out to be a major disappointment and the companion piece of the year -- "Dodgeball" (another hopelessly silly comedy) -- turned out to be the better of the two and brought in some $30 million on opening weekend; quite a feat for a film featuring an actor accused of starring in too many films (Ben Stiller) and an actor whose career has been reduced to shambles recently (Vince Vaughn).
"Dodgeball" is by no means a great comedy or an important piece of work but it doesn't have any pretensions to be. It follows in the path of slacker underdog movies like "Animal House" and just about any sports movie you can think of but it doesn't try to be anything more than what it is: an entertaining piece of trash. This is not out to win an Oscar, its purpose is to make us laugh and I did so quite a bit.
Vaughn is perfectly cast as an average Joe who owns a gym called Average Joes (ah, irony). Stiller is the owner of the competing "Globo-Gym," a super-slick company with a $4 million price tag and an interesting company slogan: "We're better than you, and we know it!" When Peter (Vaughn) fails to pay off debts his gym faces foreclosure and he must raise fifty thousand dollars or else Stiller will buy his land and turn it into a huge parking lot for Globo-Gym.
So in order to raise the cash Peter and his die-hard gym members (a pack of idiots, losers and a wannabe-pirate [?]) compete in the American Dodgeball Association of America (I didn't get the joke the first time I heard it!) against Globo-Gym's Purple Cobras team.
Ben Stiller's been getting on my nerves a bit lately, wearing his put-upon-nice-guy shtick into the ground. He's reached a point -- along with Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell and Luke Wilson -- where they all just goof off in their movies, performing cameos or appearing in starring roles, and at first it's pretty amusing but after a while the whole Troup Stiller/Wilson routine gets old... "Anchorman" had Ferrell, Wilson, Stiller and Vaughn, and "Starsky and Hutch" had the other Wilson, Stiller, Vaughn, Ferrell etc... not to mention the fact that Duplex, Meet the Fockers and Along Came Polly all featured performances by Stiller that were eerily similar.
Anyway suffice to say Stiller gives his best 2004 performance in "Dodgeball," creating an over-the-top character who's very similar to the obsessive weight loss instructor in one of his earliest comedies, "Heavy Weights," which might be a sequel of sorts to this since "Dodgeball" supposedly takes place in 1993 and that movie took place in 1994...
Overall "Dodgeball" is just good silly fun. Stiller is doing another one of his usual routines but he's a great deal funnier than he has been in many other films last year, and I like him better as the angry freak rather than the put-upon shmuck, which he's simply done way too much lately.
The movie delivers laughs and doesn't attempt to do anything else... I'm not making this out to be a great movie because it's not. It's the sort of popcorn flick I'd watch if it came on TV in the future -- worth a rental at least.