February 21, 2005 - 3:38 pm
CAUTION: The following review is rife with conversational ramblings and far too much personal information that have nothing to do with the movie being reviewed. You have been warned.
At this years super bowl party, Tammy won the pool (the betting kind, not the chlorine kind) and came away with a gift card to Blockbuster Video. (Tammy has a knack for winning things that really bothers me, as I am a student of math and probability which she somehow always outwits. But that’s a story for another day.)
I’m not fond of Blockbuster. I appreciate that, as a company, they do what they can to help out family values, such as refusing to offer NC-17 movies. But on the other hand, I’m cheap and renting at Blockbuster isn’t. We don’t have a membership at Blockbuster, so what the heck were we going to do with the gift card. We finally made a trip into the store to see what we could barter. They had a sale going on pre-viewed DVDs and we bought three.
I’m also not fond of buying movies. I don’t watch movies often, and I certainly have no need to own a movie unless it’s something I might invite friends over to watch, like LOTR. It has to be a really great movie for me to want to buy it.
Tammy likes to buy movies. Nothing wrong with that. She likes to watch movies that she enjoys and often spends a rainy Saturday watching a feel-good flick that she’s seen a dozen times. It’s logical and I don’t hold it against her. Sometimes she wants to buy something because she’s heard it’s good, even if she hasn’t seen it. Such was the case with “Dodgeball”. We’d heard the youth kids going on about it and decided, “What the heck. It’s basically free anyway.”
Okay… now to the actual review.
The kids were wrong. This movie sucked.
I have said before that I like Ben Stiller‘s comedic style. I have to qualify that statment now. I like Ben Stiller’s average guy that can’t get a break style, made famous by “Meet the Parents”. I really hate his “Zoolander” type comedy. It’s dumb. Not “Dumb and Dumber” dumb. It’s dumb like that guy in your office who thinks he’s really funny and always does that same little joke, accent, or quip that wasn’t really funny to anybody but him the first time but he keeps doing it anyway dumb. It’s not funny and it’s annoying that he thinks it is funny. “Dodgeball” is “that guy”.
The story is fun enough. A lazy, fun loving, warm hearted guy runs a shabby fitness gym populated by all manner of social out casts. Across the street, Stiller’s character runs a huge, high dollar, trendy fitness club. Let the trite plot line begin. The protagonist, played by Vince Vaughn, is going to lose his gym to the snobbish yet stupid antagonist, Stiller, unless he can come up with a load of cash. Low and behold, there’s a national dodgeball tournament coming up and the prize money is, to the penny, the amount he needs to save his gym. I’m sure you can figure out the rest of the movie. (I have a feeling a chimp with a brain tumor could figure it out.)
There were a handful of jokes that did get me to laugh out loud, simply because they were so far out in left field. (“If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball… CLANG!”) But the minutes (which seemed like hours) in between those few jokes were not just not funny, they were border-line insulting. Am I really expected to laugh at a redneck lusting after a male cheerleader wannabe while he wash’s the redneck’s big ol’ 4×4? That’s not funny. That’s disturbing. And please, please, please, someone tell Hollywood that there is nothing funny about a geriatric with a bondage fetish. Ick.
One out of a possible five grins. ‘Nuff said.
