A comedy??

Rating: Null/10 (11 November 2004)

I only nipped on here quickly to pen a few lines on Dodgeball, but thought I would read a few other reviews quickly. I'm amazed to learn it was a comedy.
I watched it on a plane which I now feel let down by, as at least having been in a cinema, I could've at least have been made aware of the scenes I was supposed to laugh at.
If it was meant to be slap stick it was a poor mans Airplane or Naked Gun. How many more of these 'Groups of Misfits decide to enter a sports competition and ... wait for it ... they win - and beat a load of pros along the way' films will we get? We've had Major League, Up N Under, a million football ones. They're all exactly the same but with a different shaped ball.
The dodge ball game itself seemed quite enjoyable, but would've been better if they devoted a few minutes more to the game and less time or pathetic, supposedly amusing incidents. In the first game against the Girl Guides, fair enough - have some of the players be hit in the face & knocked out by a ball. But we had about a dozen matches of this in all. It was exactly the same situations recycled with different characters over & over again.
The Ben Stiller character was so over the top it was ridiculous. Likewise, so were all the opposition teams: Lumberjacks, the Japanese. They didn't add anything that having 6 ordinary looking blokes in shorts & a T Shirt would have had, the Average Joe team (with the exception of the thin geeky bod who was an outstanding character) offered nothing remotely amusing and quite what the point of the co-commentator alongside Gary Cole was, I will never know. Vince Vaughn is a good actor & always strikes me as good decent bloke, but I'm still unsure as to what his best acting role is. It wasn't this. He was actually one of the best things about Dodgeball, but (and I can't put my finger on exactly what) something didn't seem right with his role here.
Humour always loses credibility for me, when reality has to be suspended so much that things that would normally kill someone ie Spanners being thrown into someones head barely even graze someone. It's no different to having someone fall 500 feet off a mountain, then when they land just get up & brush themselves down and walk away unscathed.
That's fine in cartoons (when the bump on the forehead is just pressed back into place) but I can't see it as comedy in supposed films for grown-ups, if that it what this was. Even in cartoons, and something as brilliant - and as funny - as the Simpsons, Homer bouncing down a cliff and being fine, is one of the few criticisms you can level at it.
Thankfully the plane began it's descent 10 minutes from the end of this film so I missed that but it wouldn't take Einstein to work out that Average Joe's Gym must have either won the match or lost it but then clawed victory from the jaws of defeat thanks to another technicality.
I like Ben Stiller in Meet The Parents and one or two other films but that is purely on an acting or characters basis. Unfortunately this is now, I think 6 films and he is still yet to make me laugh or even raise a snigger.
3/10