Rips of BASEbasketball and dodges any type of humor! It's like a 10 minute SNL sketch stretched into a 90 minute frame!

Rating: 1/10 (3 January 2005)

I rented this film because the trailer looked very funny. The producers must have taken all the funny bits and put them into 60 seconds. After that, there was no fun to be had.
The funniest parts of this film were the ESPN graphics and jokes and Obscure Sports Quarterly, also a visual gag. The rest of the funny parts were stolen right from BASEbasketball-- the team names, the girls dancing in extreme costumes, the obscure sports idea-- but BASEbasket did it more original and more funny to watch. I highly recommend that over Dodgeball.
The movie feels like it was a SNL sketch that should have lasted 10 minutes yet was stretched to fit an hour and a half. The actors look like they were given a couple lines and then told to go for it. They look blank at times like they don't have anything funny to say. Basically if you like comedies where the characters and situations are just supposed to be hilarious and they are, like The Royal Tenenbaums, devoid of any jokes or humor beyond that. Maybe this has something to do with Ben Stiller, since he was in both films. That might be the case, since I did like Bottle Rocket and Rushmore.
I was brought up with the idea of comedies to either be satires or had a joke a minute thrown at you, like Airplane, the Naked Gun and South Park. A movie like Dodgeball moves slow because the characters, after they come into the scene and give you that one laugh, like the gym owner or the pirate guy, don't seem to have any more steam and the viewer is suppose to enjoy it for what it is. It seems to be the new wave of comedy film making and it isn't funny nor makes any sense. The jokes fall flat, like everything was improved and nothing was written down. Movies cannot live by improv alone. Take Timecode and movies like that....please.
Then, if you get the DVD, there is an alternate ending that made me laugh, not because it was funny, because it was so bad. I don't think the director knows how to make a movie. Rawson Marshall Thurber should go back to his day job!
I give this a 1, which is the lowest rating I have given any movie. If there was a 0, I would give it for my time wasted. I am glad I actually didn't see this in a theater. I would have asked for my money back.