Originally posted 6/21/04
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
Director: Rawson Marshall Thurber
Writer: Rawson Marshall Thurber
Producers: Stuart Cornfeld, Ben Stiller
Stars: Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Christine Taylor, Rip Torn, Justin Long, Stephen Root
The non sequiter is the redheaded stepchild of American humor, particularly in movies and television. Executives at world-straddling conglomerates are uncomfortable with things that don’t make sense, and would feel much better if every joke was obvious enough for everyone to know it was a joke. If it turns out to not be funny because of this, they can always blame the zeitgeist for shifting and reach for their golden parachute.
Which is why it’s such a rare pleasure to see a movie like Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, which hurls jokes at you that, provided you could stop laughing, you still wouldn’t be able to explain why they’re funny.
Sure it’s dumb. But, if you follow me, it’s smart about how it’s dumb. And it’s clichéd, too – notice how a key prop is labeled Deus Ex Machina. But, since the filmmakers know that all the sports movies have clichés, and we know they’re clichés, and they know that we know that they’re clichés, they’re nimble enough to subversively riff on those clichés even as they’re building a plot out of them.
The bottom line must be, does it make you laugh? In spite of some sloppiness, and a few less-than-inspired bad-taste moments, it does. Louder than you may be willing to admit to afterwards.
Vince Vaughn has an under-appreciated little trick where he casts his eyes away for a beat – either towards the floor or the corner of the ceiling – then comes back. It’s the most minute acknowledgment of how ludicrous he thinks something is in spite of his best efforts to take it seriously. It’s perfect at the center of this movie, which is populated by such weirdos that your lead must be able to treat them with sincerity while giving us that little wink.
He plays Peter La Fleur, a genial slacker who runs – or perhaps more accurately, occupies the owner’s office of – Average Joe’s Gym, where people who are anything but average can come, feel like they belong, and occasionally make use of the equipment. Where else would someone like Steve the Pirate (Alan Tudyk) hang out?
That gift Vaughn has for underplaying against the absurd is pushed to its limits around his arch-nemesis, White Goodman (Ben Stiller). Goodman owns Globo Gym, the multi-million-dollar facility across the street, where he preaches a combination of self-loathing and reinvention through extreme dieting, exercise, and reconstructive surgery. “Of course, you’ll still be you in a legal sense” he reassures us in a commercial.
Goodman has lustful designs on Average Joe’s Gym, and on Kate Veatch (Christine Taylor), the attorney dispatched to organize its finances now that it’s in extreme foreclosure. She’s also a hell of a softball pitcher, which comes in handy.
Stiller produced this movie through his company Red Hour Films, and it’s likely his presence that got it made at all. His ability to cut loose as Goodman must be a prime reason; after playing sphincter-clenched yuppies in somewhere between 9 and 24 movies this year, it must be refreshing to return to the sort of hyper-grotesque pseudo-human lovers of his short-lived sketch comedy show remember so fondly.
Goodman would fit right alongside Tony Bobbins, the motivational guru who hypnotized you with his teeth. He is irradiated testosterone, so addled by the achievement of ultimate fitness and masculinity that he can barely speak in coherent sentences, and blissfully unaware of the signs of homoeroticism that follow him everywhere (just why does he name his team the “Purple Cobras”?)
Average Joe’s Gym and its resident misfits need money fast, and their best chance for getting it is to band together and enter the American Dodgeball Association of America’s annual tournament in Las Vegas, which is broadcast on ESPN8 (a.k.a. “The Ocho”.)
After they sneak into the tournament on a technicality, they are joined for the requisite training sequences by Patches O’Houlihan (Rip Torn), a “7-time ADAA All-Star” they first glimpse in a training film from the 50’s (the younger version is played, briefly and uproariously, by Hank Azaria).
Patches is in a wheelchair now, and given to colorful obscenities (as these coaches have been required to be since Rocky), but there is a painful logic behind lessons like “if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball!”
He reveals what we’ve always suspected about crotchety trainers in sports movies – it’s not tough love, they really just like hurting people. Which, if you think about it, is probably exactly what happens when a “7-time ADAA All-Star” ends up in a wheelchair. He also finds just about the most surprising, gut-busting way to fulfill another cliché about these characters that you could imagine. And about that I dare say no more.
The dodgeball scenes themselves are too, too brief – anyone who remembers that schoolyard combination of humiliation and applied Darwinism, along with the unmistakable poink! sound those hard rubber balls make, will be longing for more. It’s nostalgia from a safe distance, we laugh because we remember how much those things could hurt.
Back at Charles W. Springmeyer Elementary School in Cincinnati, we played a ridiculously elaborate variation on this game called “War”. It involved huge teams, some players riding around on four-wheeled floor scooters, bowling pins each team was trying to knock down on the other side, and all sorts of other nonsense. I was playing one of my best games once when Matt Howe eliminated me by crossing his side’s line illegally and not getting called for it. That I’m the type of person who still even remembers that is probably a big reason why I enjoy this movie, I’ll admit without shame.
At the tournament we get two more humor bonuses – one, a string of celebrity cameos whose very pleasure lies in their randomness; and two, the color commentary supplied by Gary Cole and Jason Bateman as “The Ocho”’s play-by-play team. Like many sports announcers, they make up for with statistics and faux-sincerity what they lack in purpose or context.
This is Rawson Marhsall Thurber’s first feature (he created the character of “Terry Tate, Office Linebacker” in a short film and subsequently used it in a successful series of commercials), and there are signs of awkwardness – some scenes stretch too long for their intended purpose, while other plot points are missing entirely (and I’m guessing are on the cutting room floor somewhere, sacrificed to concerns about running time). Still, it’s a bold and memorable effort, because it is unashamedly itself, and damned if it has to explain itself to anyone. Just like Steve the Pirate. I can only imagine what studio executives thought of him.