Warning: this comment contains gratuitous baseball terminology!

Rating: 8/10 (7 February 2007)

If you love your comedies real stupid, then The Benchwarmers will leave you rolling in the dugout with its screwball humour. Right off the bat, this little gem, from Happy Gilmore director Dennis Dugan, delivers the zany laughs and oddball characters that should appeal to fans of similar 'whacky' movies (if you love Anchorman, Zoolander, Deuce Bigalow or Napolean Dynamite, then you should love this too).
Rob Schneider plays Gus, a lovable landscape gardener who is friend to two nerds, Richie (David Spade), a video shop clerk, and Clark (Jon Heder), a newspaper boy. When Gus rescues a kid being bullied by the local little league team, he starts a chain of events which sees the three grown-up losers entering a baseball tournament, representing dorks all over the USA. With the games broadcast over the internet, the three quickly become the idols of geeks everywhere.
But Gus is harbouring a secret which threatens to ruin his friendship with Richie and Clark, and their chance of winning the competition: at high school, he was a bully himself...
Starting off as silly and quickly progressing to outright dumb, this movie managed to keep me laughing for the majority of its running time. Schneider is his usual reliable dopey self, Heder plays a character that is Napolean Dynamite in all but name, and Spader is great as the movie geek who rates a film's success by how many lesbian sex scenes it has. Joining these no-hopers is Jon Lovitz, who plays the ultra-nerdy billionaire who funds the tournament.
The humour isn't very sophisticated (but then neither am I) and if you don't enjoy jokes about farts, bogies and midgets, then you would be best advised to steer clear. But for the rest of us who do, The Benchwarmers definitely hits a home run!
And if the film drops the ball somewhat towards the end with a slightly overly saccharine finale that preaches forgiveness and understanding, it doesn't matter too much; the rest of the film is such dumb fun that it's easy to be a little forgiving yourself (see, even I learnt something from the film's message!)