Like an endless Monty Python sketch..................

Rating: 1/10 (29 July 2007)

If this were the "Eurovision Song Contest","Dodgeball" would be awarded the dreaded "Nil Points".It is a movie beyond bad.Mr Rip Torn is the best thing about it .He is merely very very bad.Apart from Mr Ben Stiller,Mr Torn is the only member of what can loosely described as "The Cast" that I have ever heard of and I am quite keen to keep it that way.Not that Mr Stiller is any good.He is so bad the word "bad" begins to lose any meaning.He contrived to screw up "The Royal Tenenbaums" but it flowed blithely around him.He managed to be less amusing than Robert de Niro in "Meet the parents",not an easy task for a comedian.In "Dodgeball",in the face of sterling opposition,he gives the worst performance in the movie. I have never heard of dodgeball as a competitive sport,I thought it had been invented purely for the movie,rather like "Rollerball",but it appears not to be the case.That being so,all I can say is "Only in America"...... The game appears to revolve around two teams throwing a ball as hard as possible at each other with the object of hitting an opponent with it. We may have to wait some time for the Joe DiMaggio of dodgeball to emerge I would imagine. Whatever its merits or otherwise as a game per se,whether it is a worthy subject for a feature film is certainly to say the least debatable. What is beyond debate is that "Dodgeball" is a movie that has been allowed to sprawl,start and stutter with no sign of a controlling hand until it peters out rather like a Monty Python sketch nobody could be bothered to think of an end for. The man who made this should be smacked gently but firmly on the legs, have his toys taken away from him and made to promise never to do it again.