I’m sure I ought to be quite ashamed to admit this before this publication’s undoubtedly erudite readership, but I found Dodgeball – a comedic production reliant upon fat cheerleaders, pirate wannabes and geriatric S & M-ers - uproariously entertaining. There now, you have it, so sniff if you must, but not since the Farrelly brothers’ classic Kingpin (shut up, it’s a masterpiece) or Tom Green’s unfairly maligned Freddy Got Fingered (double the masterpiece) has any movie warranted the tag ‘guilty pleasure’ quite like Mr. Thurber’s film.
Not that the pre-fabricated plot isn’t every bit as cobbled and Hollywood as the film’s subtitle might suggest. Joe La Fleur (Vaughn) is the every-boy proprietor of a sorry, slummy excuse of a gym (named ‘Average Joes’, no less) populated by soft-bodied misfits and adorned by fittingly impotent, Oprahfied slogans (‘Failure is an option – it helps us learn from our mistakes’). Faced with losing this less-than-thriving enterprise to the glossy, Nietzchean fitness-empire controlled by the egomaniacal White Goodman (Ben Stiller), a wacky scheme involving a cash prize, a trip to Las Vegas and a stand-off between the rivals becomes inevitable. The arena is Dodgeball - a Darwinian pastime even by the barbaric standards of American high-school sports - comprising throwing, ducking, catching and multiple groin injuries.
Like Zoolander, this is a bit of a one-joke affair, but we can’t rightly quibble with a movie that trades on Ben Stiller’s endearingly self-flagellating talents, Chuck Norris cameos, Gary Cole’s bargain-basement sports-caster and the delightful spectacle of mad old Rip Torn throwing wrenches at people. The steady drip of such deliriously low-brow kicks amount to something like a trashy date which leaves you skipping home with a smile on your face, while you happily throw away the boy’s phone number.
Readers of more refined propriety (wow, are you ever reading the wrong film pages…), should, however note that Dodgeball is the kind of movie which assumes that safari suits, handlebar moustaches and David Hasslehoff are inherently hilarious. You won’t hear any arguments from me.