Waterboy review

Rating: 5/10 (22 January 2020)

This comedy starts off very intriguing and hilarious. I usually don't laugh out loud, but this movie had me laughing almost every minute the first half an hour. The movie starts out with Bobby Boucher, a 31 year old man, serving as a waterboy for a championship college football team. The football team pesters him any chance they get and they enjoy busting up his 'water system'. He obviously has some disabilities as his voice is extremely high and he has a vocal stutter and a lisp; and he's a 31 year old man who still lives with his mom (Helen Boucher or as Bobby calls him, 'mama'). Him living with his mom does not really help him at all as 'mama' seems to give him useless information that often makes him look more simple-minded and stupid. Bobby ends up getting fired as the waterboy on the championship team and he has nothing else to do so he becomes the waterboy for a losing rival team; by losing I mean a 40-game losing streak. Bobby finds some similarities with this new coach (Coach Klein) as he is shy and not demanding like the old coach. At practice one day, the quarterback decides to run a play where one of the receivers runs a very wide route; so wide, in fact, that he knocks down Bobby and his water station. Coach Klein convinces Bobby to stand up for himself so during the next play Bobby releases all his anger and unleashes a spectacular tackle on the quarterback. The coach decides to put him in the lineup on the football team as middle linebacker because of his amazing tackle. This is where I start to realize where this movie is going and I kind of lose interest. It starts to become very predictable and starts to become a stereotypical sports comedy movie; where there is someone who gets made fun of until they come off the bench and start playing and everyone sees how great they are. This is exactly what happens as Bobby turns out to be an amazing linebacker who helps break the teams' 40-game losing streak, eventually bringing them to the championship which is, not surprisingly, against his former team. Bobby helps his new team win the championship and he is the big hero. The other problem I find with this movie is how it may offend people with disabilities. As I said earlier, I was laughing non-stop at the start of the movie, but as the movie progressed I realized how offensive this movie could be for people with disabilities like Bobby. In the movie he portrayed as a simple-minded fool who can't converse with anyone, has no friends, and still lives with his mom at 31. This might offend lots of people as the movie is basically saying that disabled people are worthless unless they do something amazing for the community; like help a football team win a championship, for example. Overall, I think this movie can be funny for younger people, but it is far too predictable to be enjoyed by the majority of adults and older teens. I don't think it is the best movie for young kids, anyway, as it might blur their opinion on disabled people and make them think that there is no place for them in society.