D.C. MOVIE GUYS

Once or sometimes twice a year, the Washington Film Society holds an event they refer to as the “trailer park” in which they get together a selection of 25-30 coming attraction reels, string them together, find a couple of yahoos to act as hosts, and a splendid time is guaranteed for all (at least when the aforementioned two yahoos shut their traps). At evening’s end, a highly evolved scientific selection process chooses the best trailer of the night. Following the most recent of these events, the sage members of the Film Society chose Dodgeball—A True Underdog Story as the best in show. But you know how it usually works with coming attractions, the better the reel the worse the movie (after all, one of their other finalists that night was the execrable The Chronicles of Riddick).
Happily, that is not the case with Dodgeball—A True Underdog Story (hereafter DATUS).
And the main reason is that rather than making your standard post-Rocky sports movie, writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber has locked his tongue firmly in cheek and made a sports movie lampooning all the seriously-intended clichés of the last 28 years that followed in the wake of the first sports movie ever to win an Oscar for best picture. Now I am not going to pick on Rocky. I loved the Italian Stallion through at least three and one-half movies. But whom can we conveniently blame for the music-backed training montage, the grizzled trainer/sensei, the acting career of Brigitte Nielsen, and Stop or My Mom Will Shoot? Rocky Balboa, the loveable South Philly tomato can turned movie franchise.
It helps that Vince Vaughn is the lead and Ben Stiller only plays the supporting villain in DATUS. Pete La Fleur (Vaughn) runs the casual, regular guys gym across the street from the super exclusive upscale gym run by White Goodman (Stiller channeling Oscar nominee William Zabka from the Karate Kid series). Their motto is “we’re better than you are and we know it.” And although Regular Joe’s Gym is not much, Stiller covets the gym’s site for a parking facility. Worse, Pete is $50,000 in arrears with his bank and all the bank’s cute accountant Kate Veatch (Christine Taylor, Stiller’s wife and professional Marcia Brady look-alike) can find are a lot of unpaid dues since Vaughn is too nice a guy to cast anyone out. The solution that one of Regular Joe’s regulars comes up with is to win the Las Vegas dodgeball tournament which will gain them exactly the $50,000 needed to save the ranch, err, gym. But what can a bunch of guys whose experience with dodgeball mostly involved being the first eliminated do to challenge the world’s best? For that they need coach and dodgeball legend Patches O’Houlihan (Rip Torn) whose training techniques include throwing wrenches (“If you can dodge the wrench, you can dodge the ball.”). Patches will make them a team. But who stands in their way and whom will they play in the finals (telecast on ESPN 8—the “Ocho”)? Shades of Clubber Lang, but through fraud, chicanery and general meanness, their next-door rivals led by Stiller.
Vaughn—the lone sane character in the cast—who generally counsels giving up—sometimes appears to be acting in a different movie (just like in Old School) and that Stiller is not on screen long enough to wear out his one-note part’s welcome. Excruciating as the lead in far too many recent features to recall, Stiller’s support does more here than any leading (or leaden) work in recent memory. Thurber first gained notice by coming up with the short film that led to the “Office Linebacker” commercials that were the highlight of the non-game portion of the recent Super Bowl telecast. His ability to play the parody with a mostly straight face while not overdoing it is DATUS’s greatest strength.
So with a lot of funny bits, more Vaughan than Stiller, and touching all the sports movie requirements while still noting how idiotic they are and DATUS will be enjoyed even by those routinely picked last for their dodgeball teams.

Joe Barber
1/2
Is “Dodgeball” a brilliant, cleverly written satire on the macho sporting culture in America? No. Is it a subversive attack on our obsession with winning and losing? Is it simply a silly good time, loaded with laughs? Oh, yes, big time. Vince Vaugh, Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor have delivered the first broad based, good time comedy of the summer season, a movie with more laugh out loud moments than any movie released this year.
Vaughn stars as Peter, the nice guy owner of a second rate health club called “Average Joe’s”. He’s a terrible businessman with a small group of regular members who aren’t exactly the buffest guys on the block, but Peter and the guys are a fairly close knit bunch. Trouble starts when Peter’s childhood rival, White Goodman (Stiller), owner of a high gloss national chain of gyms with a location next to “Joe’s”, decides to call in a few favors at the bank. It seems Peter’s taxes are way overdue, his loans are in default and he has thirty days to come up with $50,000 dollars or he’ll lose “Joe’s”. A beautiful bank officer (Taylor) seems at first to be on Goodman’s side, but soon finds herself rooting for Peter and his sad sack bunch. Just when things seem darkest, one of the guys comes up with an idea. He convinces the others to enter the World Dodgeball Competition. Airing on ESPN8 (”the Ocho”), the winning team will take home-you guessed it-$50,000 dollars. But there are plenty of traps and problems ahead for our intrepid heroes.
Screenwriter and first time director Rawson Marshall Thurber (who also created the popular “Terry Tate:Office Linebacker” character for the Staples ad series), strikes just the right mood in this engagingly goofball film. The script delights in tweaking the familiar clichés of sporting films from “Rocky” to “Hoosiers” as the scrappy underdogs who are fighting for more than prize money learn to work together and depend on each other. Thurber smartly celebrates these creaky old plotlines while also satirizing and tweaking them.
Thurber gets pitch perfect performances from his cast. Vaughn does a great job of underplaying his part, acting as a terrific straight man to the lunacy around him. Stiller, who has sometimes seemed overexposed with five films in release in the last eight months (and some of them unworthy of his skills), clearly has a great time making White the dumbest, most self obsessed movie villain since Kevin Kline’s Otto in “A Fish Called Wanda”.
Taylor gets to display an energy and spunk here that was missing from her role in “Zoolander”. The supporting cast, led by invaluable veteran performers Rip Torn and Stephen Root, is hilarious and there are a clutch of great cameos by Chuck Norris, William Shatner and Gary Cole. (By the way-when is Shatner going to wake up to the fact we’re not always laughing with him these days? Just wondering. .)
“Dodgeball” belongs in that class of broad, goofy summer comedies like “Meatballs”, “Stripes” and “Caddyshack”. I won’t be surprised at all if, in five or ten years, guys in their late teens and early twenties are going around quoting lines from this film to each other. I’m laughing now just thinking of it and I’m sure I’ll still laugh when I hear them several years from now. In the meantime, you should go and laugh now-and stick around to the end of credits. You’ll thank me later.

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