Happy Gilmore - 1996

"Happy Gilmore" - 1996
Dir. by Dennis Dugan - 1 hr. 32 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

I'm not much for New Year's Eve celebrations; instead of "Happy New Year," I watched "Happy Gilmore."  It's not really that different to watch familiar rituals to celebrate a milestone, I just prefer to watch Bob Barker drop Adam Sandler to watching a disco ball drop.  I think "Happy Gilmore" is one of those films that every guy over a certain age has seen, probably more than once.  It's like mashed potatoes and meatloaf; comedic comfort food that's actually aged reasonably well.

Happy Gilmore (Adam Sandler) is a wannabe hockey player who routinely gets cut at the open tryouts every year, mostly because he can't skate.  Hockey is the one thing on his mind, and pretty much the only thing that keep Happy from acting like a homicidal maniac (pretty much, because he admits that he took off his skate and tried to stab a guy with the blade once).  As it turns out, his Grandma (Frances Bay) has fallen behind on her taxes, and is going to lose her house unless a considerable sum of money is raised, and in the meantime, she has to stay in nursing home run by fu-manchu'd taskmaster, Hal (Ben Stiller).  It turns out that Happy has a tremendous ability to drive a golf ball, and he ends up on the pro tour after winning a pro/am tournament, where he butts heads with Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald).

There are a lot of reasons to dismiss "Happy Gilmore" and it's star, Adam Sandler, and many people were happy to do so when it came out.  I will grant that Sandler yells a lot, and generally provokes a 100% love or 100% hate reaction from people.  The film is visually very straight-forward (which is a nice way of saying that it's rudimentary).  There's little nuance to anything.  But, when you've got a fist-fight with Bob Barker, that doesn't matter much.  There's a ton of funny moments, some endlessly quoted.

And funny trumps everything, especially in a comedy.  If you watched some of Bill Murray's earliest films (like "Meatballs," in particular), you're not getting a finished product.  This is a rough-around-the-edges product, a bunch of funny ideas jammed together under the umbrella of a classic "save the house" plot.  This isn't really an "actor" movie, nor do any of the other characters exist for plot purposes beyond Shooter McGavin (who is a fantastically sleazy asshat of a man) and the girl, Virginia (Julie Bowen), who exists to be the girl in the movie.

You may hate Adam Sandler and his films and his goofy face and annoying voice, but this is the real deal.  It's not smoothed out, the film doesn't really strive for any kind of pacing or cleverness, it's just Sandler doing what he does.  There are plenty of people who hate that.  And others who have come to hate that.  But there's also a ton of people who love it, and would stop flipping channels the second they came across "Happy Gilmore."  Only you know where you fall on that continuum, but I like re-watching "Happy" every so often.

3 / 5 - Streaming

Tower Heist - 2011

"Tower Heist" - 2011
Dir. by Brett Ratner - 1 hr. 44 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

I wish I could get over this, but I do hold it against a film when it's advertised as something a bit different than what it actually is.  Part of the issue with "Tower Heist" is the cast; when you have something that stars Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy, there's going to be an expectation that you probably have a comedy on your hands.  That's not to say that either actor hasn't done dramatic work, but when the trailer cherry-picks the movies for the few jokes present, that's a promise that the full film can't deliver.  "Tower Heist" isn't a comedy.  It's not really a drama, either.  It's not really a good movie.  It's not a terrible movie, either.  It just sort of exists.

In a building called "The Tower," which is purported to be the most expensive real estate in the world, Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller) runs the support staff, which is the real draw of the building.  They exist to make everyone's life run smoothly, and do so very well.  One of the tenants, Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda) is an investment banker on Wall Street, and runs afoul of the law.  Coincidentally, part of Shaw's Ponzi Scheme involved The Tower's staff pension fund, which has now been wiped out.  After Josh and a pair of co-workers get fired after confronting Shaw, the idea of stealing Shaw's as-yet-unlocated rainy day fund is drunkenly put in Josh's head by the FBI Agent in charge of the Shaw case, Special Agent Clair Denham (Tea Leoni).

So when I say "Tower Heist" isn't a comedy, I mean to say that it's not particularly funny.  There are a few decent exchanges, but Stiller's character is the main one, and he's a very earnest, straight-forward character (and even that trait isn't ever really put on blast).  If you put Eddie Murphy and Ben Stiller (and Tea Leoni, and Casey Affleck, and Michael Pena, and Matthew Broderick, and Alan Alda) on the screen in various configurations, there's going to be a few moments here and there, but the story is more of a timely, socially-conscious Robin Hood tale than anything else.  I can see the thinking behind this film - it's like trying to set up a situation where you could morally justify pulling an "Ocean's Eleven."  You've got the same colorful variety of characters (well, not the same exactly, but I think you know what I'm getting at), the "impossible" heist, a burgeoning love story, a ritzy setting.  But if you sat down and watched Steven Soderbergh's "Ocean's Eleven" and Brett Ratner's "Tower Heist" back-to-back, you'd see exactly what the difference in the two men are as filmmakers.

That comparison is going to be a rough one for Ratner, but he's not without skill as a filmmaker.   For as much as I felt like the plot (and characters, for that matter) weren't fleshed out as much as I would have preferred, Ratner will give you a smooth ride.  He's proven that over and over again, that he can make a big Hollywood action comedy movie, and even if you're not blown away by it, you're not going to be shifting in your seat and checking your watch.  Enough things happen with enough regularity that there aren't dead spots or lulls, it's more that all of it doesn't add up to much.  It never feels like any of the characters hit a real low (at least in the sort of way that you, as an audience member, would feel - it all feels like shorthand for bad times).  Even when one of the characters attempts suicide over having his retirement wiped out, it's skirted around, and when you see him in a hospital bed afterwards, he's not messed up at all.  He may as well have been taking a nap.  And since Ratner never really gets across the low times with any conviction, whatever successes occur don't resonate as hard-earned victories, either.  And beyond that, not getting an audience to feel anything real in the first place makes the logic behind suddenly deciding to steal TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS flimsy.  These are basic storytelling flaws, but it also fits with Brett Ratner's career.  Never too high, never too low, just a smooth ride.

Most of what's good comes from the cast of "Tower Heist."  Stiller and Tea Leoni have an easy, brusque chemistry that makes me wish this film had been a romance comedy between these two characters, with the big heist in the background.  Everyone who had more than a line or two made the most of them.  It just didn't matter a whole lot.  By the time we got to the actual heist, I wasn't really rooting for anyone, I was just hoping that something funny might happen.  The idea of pulling something over on one of the Wall Street jackasses is one that's ripe with potential, very little of that potential is on display in "Tower Heist."  But Heavy D did have a "blink and you'll miss it" role, and I was pretty happy about that.

1.5 / 5 - TV (HD)

Zoolander - 2001

"Zoolander" - 2001
Dir. by Ben Stiller - 1 hr. 29 min.

Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

There are a lot of good jokes in "Zoolander."  Yes, making fun of male models is kind of like shooting fish in a barrel full of fish with a bazooka, but some of the best moments come not from the subject matter, but from the characters themselves.  Dumb characters will always be funny, and both Derek Zoolander and Hansel are a pair of the dumbest men ever committed to film.

Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) is the shining light of the male modelling industry, but loses what would have been his fourth Model of the Year award to the new hotness, Hansel (Owen Wilson), in a spectacular gaffe.  To boot, a cover article in Time Magazine, written by Matilda Jeffries (Christine Taylor), paints Zoolander as a complete idiot, and Zoolander's modelling bunk mates all die in a manner befitting male models.  With Zoolander's career and life on the skids, stand-offish designer Mugatu (Will Ferrell) hires Zoolander to be the face of his new "Derelicte" campaign, which is a cover to use Zoolander to kill the Prime Minister of Malaysia.  And that would be bad.

First off, "Zoolander" is a really solid concept.  The story doesn't lag, and does hit all of those plot points you want to see in a riches-to-rags-to-riches story.  Even better, it knocks every single one of those plot points out of the park.  The gaffe that sends Zoolander's career into a tailspin was Kanye-worthy, before Kanye did it for real.  The failed reconciliation with his family?  Male model in a coal mine.  The love story?  The first time they make love is in the context of a drug-fueled orgy (and is still sweet, at the same time).  Even Zoolander and Hansel's burying the hatchet is a riot; every court case in America should just begin with one person asking the other, "Why are you acting so wack to me?"  And before that, the epic throwdown between the rivals is a walk-off, which is a sort of competitive modelling competition, with the best possible random judge.

And beyond the big stuff, there are dozens of small moments that are just as spectacular.  From Zoolander not understanding the concept of a table-top model of a building, to the repeated arguments over people not getting the "Earth to..." joke concept, to breakdance fighting...  "Zoolander" is so jammed full of ideas and jokes (without feeling like a series of comedy sketches that are loosely connected) that it's overflowing, and that means that sometimes you've got to pay attention or things are going to fly by unnoticed.   That's a great feeling for a comedy, especially when it's clicking (like when Matilda tells Derek and Hansel that she's bulimic, and they both think that means that she can read minds).

"Zoolander" is a comedy for people who want to laugh and feel good and stuff.  I hope the sequel, whenever that happens, is as good (although that's pretty unlikely).  This is one of the films in director/star Ben Stiller's career that makes me keep showing up for his work.  He does a lot of "product," films that just exist because they exist, but then there are those handful of films that Stiller has done that are so riotously funny and so insane that they justify everything else he does.  "Zoolander" is up there with "There's Something About Mary" and "Tropic Thunder" (and there's probably a couple of other films that people like of his, but that would vary from person to person), that maybe give me false hope whenever I see his name in the credits, but even if his newest film isn't anything special (I saw "Along Came Polly" in the theatre, for example), it's no problem, because another viewing of "Zoolander" wipes it out of memory.

4 / 5 - Streaming

Mystery Men - 1999

"Mystery Men" - 1999
Dir. by Kinka Usher - 2 hrs. 1 min.

Theatrical Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

I remembered really liking "Mystery Men" when it came out.  Part of it was probably just the dearth of comic book adaptations, which was quickly rectified in the passing decade.  Part of it was my crush on Janeane Garofalo, part was the sheer improbability of a Hollywood film being made on a Bob Burden comic.  "Mystery Men" has a more than solid cast and is pretty funny, so what's the problem here?

First, recap.  Mr. Furious (Ben Stiller), Shoveler (William H. Macy) and the Blue Raja (Hank Azaria) are a super-hero team, sort of.  They're not any good at it, and end up trying to save senior citizens from a gang of thieves, but are quickly eclipsed when Captain Amazing (Greg Kinnear) shows up and routs the baddies.  Turns out Cap is so good at fighting crime that people, and therefore his sponsors, are losing interest.  To rekindle interest, Cap decides to get his old nemesis, Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush), sprung from Arkham Asyl...  I mean, the looney bin, so that they can renew their rivalry and Cap can continue to rake in the sweet sponsorship moolah.  Casanova has learned a few new tricks in his time away, and that leaves Furious & company as the last heroes standing between him and tragedy.

So lets start with the good.  All of the actors, and I mean all of them, do a great job.  Stiller and Garofalo (playing "The Bowler," she has a super-powered bowling ball with her deceased father's head in it, which she talks back to) bicker like you want them to, Macy plays things straight, Azaria's strange and puts on a fake British accent for much of the film.  If I recall, this was also one of the first movies that Paul Reubens (playing The Spleen, a lisping, bezitted dork armed with super-powered farts) made after his legal run-in at a theater of a different kind, and he does a great job here, too.  Pretty much all of the good stuff in "Mystery Men" (and there is plenty of good comedy and acting here) is due to the cast going above and beyond.

I have two essential problems with "Mystery Men" at this point, nearly fifteen years after its release.  The first concerns the direction; director Kinka Usher (this is his one and only feature film, he's returned to directing TV ads since) is obsessed with jamming people's faces right into the camera.  And when faces aren't approaching the camera, maybe it's a car driving right up to the camera.  I feel like I've just spent two hours looking up actor's noses and staring at people through a door's peephole.  It's unbelievably repetitive (I was aware of this quickly, and completely sick of it half an hour in); it's the sort of approach that might work in thirty-second commercials, but is unsustainable over the course of two hours.  Also, it forces an awareness of the camera that distracts from the pure storytelling aspect of "Mystery Men."

I didn't mind the story (even though it's basically a mash-up of Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's "Arkham Asylum" graphic novel and "The Warriors", which offers up little of creator Bob Burden's surrealist appeal), but the approach to making this film is hard to grasp.  I'm not a purist; I don't believe for a second that a film has to match up to it's source material at all.  They're two separate entities, and I'm more than willing to give the creators of each room to make their art work in the format that they're using.  But if you look at the source material in this case, which were throw-away characters in Burden's main comic book creation, "Flaming Carrot," I can't begin to figure out how anyone saw a film budgeted at $68 million.  "Mystery Men" is a movie based on a forgotten drunken bar joke (literally - Burden had to be reminded of a joke he'd made at a bar about a nonsensical superhero one night and then promptly forgot about), and Burden's work is surreal and crude (I don't mean that as a slight - his work's appeal lies in it's humor and approach, and not in his draftsmanship).  So how does that translate into a film that cops it's neon/greased plastic look directly from "Batman & Robin," one of the most critically reviled comic-book adaptations ever committed to film?

The entire approach is misguided and overblown; "Mystery Men" should have been an ragged indie comedy to have any chance to succeed.  Instead, we get chestnuts like the entire team walking seven-across in slow-motion through fog.  Another problem; while "Mystery Men" is set in the future, no one has a cell phone.  1999 would have been on the cusp of when people really started carrying them around, but it seems implausible to have a future world where people don't have any electronic means of communication.  I'm willing to chalk that one up to bad timing, but there's a big dividing line in film on this issue, and "Mystery Men" is on the wrong side of that line.

"Mystery Men" isn't a bad movie, it's a mixed bag.  It's funny, it's jammed full of funny characters, the cast does everything they can with what they've got to work with.  But the visual approach is infuriating and frustrating at every turn, and burns up a lot of the good will I have towards the film.  I guess all I can say is that it's fun to watch if you're not paying attention, and you'd have to file it among the comic-book movies that were made before Hollywood got even a decent grasp of how to approach this sort of material.

2 / 5 - Streaming

The Watch - 2012

"The Watch" - 2012
Dir. by Akiva Schaffer - 1 hr. 42 min.

Official Red Band Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

What a disappointment.  When I initially saw the trailer for "The Watch," I was sure it was a movie that I completely wanted to see.  But it came and went from the theatres so quickly that I didn't get the chance to catch it, at which point I started to eagerly await watching it when it hit home video.  Finally, it hit pay-TV, and I recorded it for later viewing.  But I wish I'd put it off a little longer, now that I'm done watching it.

Evan (Ben Stiller) is a go-getter, the kind of guy who starts clubs and gets things done, but doesn't have many friends.  But he does manage a Costco (and it's identified as such), and when one of his security guards is murdered on-duty, Evan decides to create a neighborhood watch to try and keep this sort of thing from happening again (since the police are incompetent and disinterested).  Evan's flyering yields three co-conspirators; Bob (Vince Vaughn), a beleaguered father of a teenage daughter, Jamarcus (Richard Ayoade),  a proper gent with an enormous afro, and Franklin (Jonah Hill), who failed the police exam, possibly due to him being a little insane.  Immediately, a power struggle breaks out between Evan's micromanaging style and Bob's attempts to inject awesomeness into everything.  But when they accidentally kill an alien and stumble upon an invasion scheme, the band of unlikely heroes decides to try to save Earth.

If my intro makes it sound like "The Watch" is a terrible movie, that's not entirely accurate.  I was disappointed, largely because this film had the tools at it's disposal to be really funny, instead of just having it's moments.  Besides, when you put Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn together, there's going to be an instant comparison to "Dodgeball," which was kind of awesome and completely re-watchable.  But the mix was all off here, and there are problems with the writing that could have been fixed, and resulted in a better movie.  What problems, you may ask?  Well, we're going to have to explicitly compare "The Watch" to "Dodgeball" to show what I mean.

Stiller's character in "Dodgeball" was the villain, and was driven to the point of absurdity, which was shown in embarrassing detail.  That was part of the fun, that Stiller's character was a buffoonish jackass, but still could have plausibly ended up victorious.  Stiller's Evan is also shown to be a driven character, but instead of that being his Achille's Heel, his shameful secret (SPOILER!!!1!) is that he's sterile.  Now, are there any scenes in "The Watch" that are comedic in nature on this topic?  Not really.  Stiller hangs his head a lot, which isn't funny, and when he finally reveals this to his wife, Abby (Rosemarie DeWitt), they make up and promise to be a team, which also isn't funny.  It's also not dramatic, because up until that point, his wife's only role in the story is to figuratively scream "put a baby in me" at Evan, so for the most part, nobody cares about her as a character.  And as such, no one cares (I don't mean that sarcastically, but if you don't build a character up, an audience won't feel anything for that character when things happen to them) when they kiss and make up.  And Abby's joining the neighborhood watch doesn't really have any story-line implications, either.  The result of all of this is that you have a secondary character that isn't established well enough, and the interactions between Abby and Evan don't have any resonance, either.  So you have the motivations of the main character in your movie falling flat.

This problem extends to the other characters, as well.  What made Vince Vaughn's character work in "Dodgeball" was his bizarre ambivalence to everything around him, and almost deliberate resistance to success of any kind.  Seemingly, what he wanted more than anything was to be left alone and to do nothing.  Here, it's not hard to say what his character wants the most: the safety of his teenage daughter.  Bob is seeking solace from his rocky relationship in the neighborhood watch, but it ends up confusing his character's path.  Either he wants his daughter's safety and well-being, or he wants to hang out with the guys.  But Bob choosing one over the other doesn't result in meaningful strife.  Yes, there is an argument between Bob and Evan over it, but it's not explosive enough to really put the end of the film in question.  By that point, they've already discovered the aliens, and you know the group is going to have to reconcile to square off with them.  The entire point of the big argument scene in these kinds of film is to make a viewer wonder how the characters are going to be able to cooperate with each other long enough to achieve what needs to be achieved.  It's also a convenient break so that the main character can patch things up with his romantic interest, and thus attack the goal in question with renewed vigor.  But, since the patching-up part fell flat, and the argument scene didn't accomplish the goal of putting the accomplishment of the end task in question, "The Watch" limps into the third act.

A lot of the truly funny material here made it's way into the trailer, but nearly all of the good stuff that's not in the trailer is in the third act, which is why it's a shame that "The Watch" has lost much of it's momentum by that point.  When you've got a shoot-out against aliens at a Costco, and the only way to defeat the aliens is by shooting them in the dick (really), there's an opportunity to do some funny material.  And there is some funny material.  If only the first hour-plus of the film had set things up better, the showdown would have been tremendous.  As it stands, I was thankful that the last half-hour was better than the rest of the film, but I still had to break up "The Watch" into two viewing sessions to get through it.  That's not a strong compliment, especially for a movie that I was pretty psyched about seeing.  All of the actors do a good job with what they have to work with, but it's a set of strong walls built on a shaky foundation.  "The Watch" isn't a home-run or a strike-out, it's like a bloop single.  But nobody paid to watch Babe Ruth hit bloop singles, and in this case, wasting a good cast and decent concept may as well have been like hitting into a double-play.

2 / 5 - TV

Tropic Thunder - 2008

"Tropic Thunder" - 2008
Dir. by Ben Stiller - 2 hours

Official Red Band Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

Every few years, Ben Stiller comes out with a film that justifies wading through his more mainstream fare.  Usually, it's one that he's directed himself (which is a pretty short of films, considering he's been acting in films for over twenty years), and the idea behind it is batshit insane.  "Tropic Thunder" is one of the Ben Stiller movies that makes dealing with "The Heartbreak Kid" or "Along Came Polly" almost worth it.

"Tropic Thunder" is sort of a movie about making a movie; Tugg Speedman (Stiller) is one of the stars of a film adaptation of a book of the same name, about one man's experiences during the Vietnam War.  Speedman is a fading action star, and the rest of the cast is rounded out by Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.), a critical darling who is also an unspeakably committed method actor, Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), a crossover rap star who constantly hawks his own merchandise, Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), a strung-out comedian who makes movies in the vein of "Big Momma's House," and Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel), an unknown actor.  This combination of egos and star-power are a headache for director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan), who is completely unable to wrangle the actors.  He is given the genius idea of shooting guerrilla style and dropping the actors into the jungles of Vietnam, which predictably goes awry.

Now, the idea behind the film is pretty solid, but the execution is damned near flawless.  Not only does the humor come from the characters, but the characters are as insane as you'd think a batch of famous actors would be, and then some.  But a lot of that rests on the stars' shoulders.  I can't immediately think of another film in many years where one of the leads spends the entire film essentially in blackface (that would be Downey, Jr.), another is playing a comedian strung out on heroin (Black), and the third is as dumb as the characters he plays (Stiller), and then not only get away with it, but end up being praised for it, but here we are.

One of the things that really helps is that the actors don't really ever wink to the camera.  They're all fully immersed in being dumb and being really aggressive about that (which is a proven comedy formula), and that helps when you end up having to root for these guys even though they'd all seem really awful people on the surface.  But you see that these people are behaving in a manner consistent with their personalities, and are not transparently playing that for laughs.  You can see this in the scene where Tugg plays with a severed head, trying to convince his castmates that the game is on; it's not a case of Ben Stiller playing with a head because he wants the shock value, it's Tugg playing a character trying to convince his castmates that the head is a prop because he's too dumb to realize that he's holding a dripping, leaking head in his hands.  So when Tugg eventually gets in trouble (because of course he's going to), you can't really fault him for doing dumb things.  He's a dumb man, he can't help that.  But he believes in what he's doing, and that goes a long way.

It's also very difficult to make a movie like this without actually being able to make a movie that looks like this.  Parodies can be fantastic because of their seeming amateurishness, but making a movie that looks like a  full-on action movie just to be able to make fun of some of the things in it (and this is not a parody of a war film, it's the batch of actors that the actors are playing that are the source of and the butt of pretty much every joke present) is much more subversive.  There's a wide range of kinds of movies shown in "Tropic Thunder," and the beginning sequence of faux-trailers that introduce the characters (and this is both succinct and a brilliant way to introduce a series of characters) either has to work like it's real or look completely like trash. And they look legit.  The film looks legit.  You've got those swooping helicopter shots that show the denseness of the jungle and then a village or something as transition shots (not just once, either), and those aren't even for humorous purposes!  It's just that if you make a war movie in the jungle, that shot's going to be in there.

"Tropic Thunder" is so funny it makes me a little angry that there isn't more with these characters.  I'd seriously watch any of the movies in the fake trailers, or anything with Tugg Speedman in it at all.  I'll probably have to settle for watching "Zoolander" again, and then I'll get mad that "Zoolander 2" isn't out yet.  It's times like that I weaken and start to consider re-watching "Meet the Fockers" or "Starsky & Hutch," and when I do, I'll start to get disappointed that they aren't more "Zoolander" or more "Tropic Thunder."  That's how Ben Stiller will get you.  Every five or six years, he'll do a genius comedy that you just can't dislodge from your head.  And then, for the next five or six years, you'll go see what he's been doing, hoping and failing to recapture that magic.  And then, right when Ben Stiller feels you start to slip, boom.  "Zoolander 2."

Hooked again.

4 / 5 - Blu-Ray

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story - 2004

"Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story" - 2004
Dir. by Rawson Marshall Thurber - 1 hr. 32 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

For official record keeping purposes, the version I watched was the unrated Blu-Ray cut; I couldn't tell you what the difference between the versions is, and there's only one minute's difference in the run times listed at IMDB for the theatrical version and on the packaging for the unrated version.

I don't know exactly what makes up the difference between a pretty good comedy and a really good comedy, but there is a difference.  And whatever that difference is, it's what's missing from "Dodgeball."  But also, after saying that, I also know that I'm going to have to walk that assessment back a bit, because it makes the film sound a lot worse than I think it is.  But also, on re-watching "Dodgeball" for the first time in a few years, it wasn't quite as good as I'd remembered it being.

"Dodgeball" is a classic "save the house" film: Average Joe's gym is being foreclosed upon (to be turned into a parking structure for rival Globo-Gym.  Even though gym owner Peter LaFleur (Vince Vaughn) seems more than willing to go down without a fight, his core group of gym-goers are willing to follow him to any lengths to raise the $50k needed to pay off the debt.  They include Steve the Pirate (Alan Tudyk), high-school cheerleader wannabe Justin (Long), bespectacled mail-order bride owner Gordon (Stephen Root), the gym's trainer, Dwight (Chris Williams), and befuddled team manager Owen (Joel David Moore).  These men, along with bank employee Kate Veatch (Christine Taylor), end up entering a dodgeball tournament who's cash prize is coincidentally $50k.  Globo-Gym also enters a team of ringers, led by White Goodman (Ben Stiller), for the sole purpose of trying to personally deny the Average Joes the money they need.  Yes, it's an incredibly dickish move, but a lot of the fun in this film comes from Stiller's bizarre character, and this is par for the course.

So here's the point where I try to explain why I think this is only pretty good, and not really good.  It's a tough call, especially since there are at least a couple of really classic, great comedy scenes present.  Chief among those is a one-scene appearance by Lance Armstrong, with a devastating, self-aware, yet devoid of malice instant assessment of LaFleur's situation.  There's easily a handful of heavily-quoted scenes, as well.  Everyone knows, nobody makes me bleed my own blood.  Also, thank you, Chuck Norris.  There's great scenes, memorable lines, a good cast, outrageous characters, and a foul-mouthed old man (Rip Torn playing the team's coach, Patches O'Houlihan).  So why is this movie like a B-minus instead of a B-plus?

There are a few things that chip away at the overall film.  First off, I wasn't that impressed by Vince Vaughn this time around.  He's funny in the way he's frequently funny, but as this character was written, Peter LaFleur just doesn't care about what happens one way or another.  I get the notion of having a lead character with an ironic sense of ambivalence, and it makes for some funny exchanges.  At the same time, it's leaning too heavily on irony as the source of humor; if Peter doesn't care what happens, why would a viewer?  There are a few points that a "save the house" movie has to hit in order to add up at the end, and one of them is the character arc of rousing an ambivalent/slacker-ish character to action.  This movie is already playing within the confines of that formula, but misses the mark on that point.

The second thing that I found slightly less charming than I might have before is the overacting by ten or fifteen percent thing that's going on.  It makes sense with some of the more outlandish characters (particularly Stiller's, and he's fantastic at it), but it gets exhausting when everyone's doing it.  It's another symptom of leaning too heavily on irony to carry the comedic load; some of the characters don't have any solid footing.  I don't need an explanation for Steve the Pirate, it's better off unexplained.  But there are scenes to be found at various points featuring any of the characters mugging for the camera.  It's not overt enough to be obsequious, but there's a habit overplaying things for a beat in a really unsubtle way, and it makes me want to withhold my laughter so as not to reward the lack of directorial confidence in the material and actors.  The third thing, not big enough to warrant its own paragraph, is the debt that "Dodgeball" owes to "BASEketball."  It's not a big enough deal to call shenanigans on, and this is definitely the better (and vastly more successful) of the two films, but some of the gags (from the wacky, themed teams, to the sportscaster parodies, and even basing a film around a pseudo-sport) are retreads.  The borrowed ideas are put to good use, but it's worth mentioning.

But it's a pretty good movie.  I feel like I have to keep repeating that; I had some very specific qualms watching it this time around, but I still enjoyed it very much.  It's in the top tier of both Ben Stiller's and Vince Vaughn's comedies, but not quite at the same level as "Zoolander" or "Tropic Thunder."  But, after spending all that time splitting hairs, I'll end on a positive note.  My favorite scene in the whole movie, and the one guaranteed to make me laugh every time is a small response from Justin Long, when he randomly meets the cheerleader that he's got a crush on all the way in Las Vegas.  A male cheerleader shoos the girl away from Justin, and flips him the bird.  Justin's response is a baffled, quiet, "What?"  It's just one moment, but the response is perfect; both amazed and confused that a random meeting with this beautiful girl has so quickly turned into being thrown an obscene gesture.  The Lance Armstrong scene has legs, and there are great bits scattered all the way through "Dodgeball."  But that one little moment from Justin Long kills me every time.

3.5 / 5 - Blu-Ray