Dir. Rawson Marshall Thurber, USA, 92 mins
Cast:
Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Christine Taylor, Rip Torn, Stephen Root
After many debts and bank resettlements, Peter La Fleur (Vaughn) is in need of finding fifty thousand dollars or his gym, Average Joe's, will become part of the Globo Gym chain, owned by La Fleur's mullet wearing rival, White Goodman (Stiller). However, one solution stands to attention - winning the Dodgeball championship, a sport none of our unlikely heroes knows about. With the help of lawyer, Kate ( Taylor ) and former Dodgeball champ, Patches O'Houlihan (Torn), can our unlikely heroes win the Championships in Vegas and take back their precious gym?
The last few years have been a roller-coaster for the partnership between Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller. They featured together in the wacky remake of Starsky and Hutch and each have appeared somewhere in each other's movies, but not until Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story have they truly confronted one another.
Prior to Dodgeball, sports films have generally been more about the sport or competition itself, and the emotions and challenges thereof. Be it illness, love, betrayal or loss, there has usually an element that makes for drama, or even melodrama, rather than comedy. Think Ali, Field of Dreams, Jerry Maguire. While there are comedic elements in many sports-hemed movies, rarely are there out and out comedies - until Dodgeball.
Yes, Dodgeball is predictable, but it successfully brings together slapstick, one liners, set pieces and even an inflatable cod piece to make for a film that is terribly hard not to laugh at. It is in two simple words, comic genius.
Like a sort of comedy epic, Dodgeball is pieced together by the warped imagination of the writer/director, who spawns scenes that leaves the viewer cringing deep into the credits. Like a demented Patrick Swayze, Stiller's White Goodman is deliciously evil, yet strangely camp as the gym owner/dictator with a fast food fetish. Mixed with Vaughn's 'Average Joe' and his band of misfit zeroes (including wry performances from Justin Long of Jeepers Creepers fame and Stephen Root as the middle-aged mess, Gordon), Dodgeball: The True Underdog Story has a far from awful cast, all exceeding any of their expected performances. Furthermore, it strikes a chord with all those 'underdogs' who have dreamed of success.
To quote Gary Cole's dry sports commentator Cotton McNight, "I've been to the Great Wall of China, I've seen the Pyramids of Egypt, I've even witnessed a grown man satisfy a camel, but I have never, in all my years, seen anything like Dodgeball".
Matthew Clarke
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