Dodgeball (2004)

Once again, the forces of evil have descended upon a beloved neighborhood establishment and threaten to crush it beneath the iron claw of oppression. The only salvation in sight is a highly improbable competition pitting the good guys vs. the bad in a winner-take-all slugfest.

This time, the victim is Average Joe's gym, owned and operated by Peter La Fleur (Vince Vaughn). The corporate juggernaut Globo Gym of White Goodman (Ben Stiller) has bought out La Fleur's second mortgage and plans to bulldoze Average Joe's to make way for a parking lot. Unless the patrons of Joe's can raise $50,000 in a month, their hangout is history. Luckily, they spot an ad in "Obscure Sports Quarterly" for a dodgeball tourney in Las Vegas, paying out exactly $50,000. Hooray.

Okay, that's the setup, and you can guess all the rest of the plot. The only question is whether the laughs along the way make the movie worthwhile. The answer, for the most part, is yes.

The characters are decent. Average Joe's of course has its obligatory group of stock dweebs and uncoordinated losers (with one notable standout), while Globo Gym fields its team of big buff tough guys. Vaughn's La Fleur is much more laid back than his characters in other movies like Swingers and Made. A decision was obviously made that La Fleur was going to be just as normal as normal could possibly be, but the result is in some ways almost dull. But he serves as an effective foil to Stiller's over-the-top Goodman, an egotistical masochist with bizarre fetishes and an ingrained sense of his divine right to anything he wants.

Personally, I wasn't all that impressed with Stiller in this movie. I don't think he plays over-the-top characters nearly as well as he plays the normal-but-neurotic guys of There's Something About Mary and Meet the Parents. The Goodman character is funny, but just seemed to be missing something that would have really catapulted him to a gut-busting level.

The actual dodgeball action in the movie is relatively thin and doesn't provide that many laughs. The best parts are the training sequences with Average Joe's coach, Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn), and the in-game play-by-play from Cotton McKnight (Gary Cole) and spaced-out color commentary of Pepper Brooks (Jason Bateman).

I feel compelled to compare Dodgeball to another sports spoof, Trey Parker and Matt Stone's BASEketball, and I find that Dodgeball just doesn't measure up to the latter. BASEketball's great commentary on the nature of professional sports, along with the sheer absurdity of the game itself and the great "psych-outs" put it on top. Parker and Stone display a creativity that's just unmatched in this offering.

Overall, Dodgeball is an amusing diversion and well worth viewing, but never quite lives up to all the potential of its stars or its subject.