Starring:
Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Christine Taylor, Rip Torn
Cert: 12a
Peter La Fleur (Vaughn) owns
Average Joe’s Gym. He is nice and so laid-back that his gym is going into
liquidation. White Goodman (Stiller) owns a high-tech, pristine and fascistic
ruled gym across the road and will buy up Average Joe’s to make more parking
spaces unless La Fleur can come up with $50,000 in 30 days.
La Fleur pulls together a rag-tag team of gym members into a dodgeball
team (coached by wheelchair bound Rip Torn (Men In Black))
to compete in a national competition. Of course Goodman then puts together a
team of athletic gods to try to scupper their plans.
Stiller is playing on familiar ground here with Goodman coming across as
a hybrid of Derek Zoolander and Mystery
Men’s Mr Furious. Vaughn plays it pretty straight against all the oddities
he is surrounded by but oozes sarcasm and sexual innuendo when opposite
Christine Taylor (The Brady Bunch
Movie, Zoolander). As per usual
with these types of films it is the team of misfits that carry most of the real
comedy with Alan Tudyk (First Knight,
28 Days) as a pirate and
Justin Long (Galaxy Quest, Jeepers Creepers)
as an accident prone, gawky, love-struck teen.
The story line is predictable and
the real laughs come from how many different ways the filmmakers can slap
someone in the head, really hard, with a football. Lots.
Probably not the funniest film
you’ll ever see (this year or any other) but, in a fairly lacklustre summer of
decent comedies, certainly not the worst.
