We used to play Dodgeball up North. It was fun in the sense that everyone actually hated each other in PE and it was our way of knocking the shit out of each other, with the permission of the PE teacher. We often ended up in fights, mostly amongst ourselves. In the end we dumped the balls and used fists. Happy days.

The premise for Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story is that of a gym (Average Joe’s) that is in debt and soon to be bought out by its rivals across the road (Globo Gym), to be turned in to a car park for its members. Average Joe’s is not much of a gym, and more of a place to hang out with the owner, Peter La Fleur (played by Vince Vaughn), who doesn’t really care whether or not the gym is successful.

White Goodman (Stiller) is the owner of Globo Gym, and decides to hire a lawyer named Kate Veatch (Christine Taylor) from the bank to deal with arrangements of buying out Average Joe’s. Average Joe’s makes several failedattempts at raising the funding to save the gym, and come upon a competition of dodgeball, which would provide the correct amount of funding to save the gym.

As you can probably guess, Globo Gym hears of this and decides to enter the contest to stop Average Joe’s from succeeding. All sorts of nonsensical subplots develop and we find the two rival gyms at each other’s throats for the prize money, and to resolve a personal dispute between Fleur and Goodman.

The film does have some good moments, granted, but these are mostly when the tournament takes place, even the humour is few and far between

The film is rather slow, and doesn’t really entertain until the introduction of Rip Torn as Patches O’Houlihan, who comes across as a brash and slightly disturbed ex-dodgeball champion. Both his dialogue and his performance is brilliant, and easily outshines the rather dull main stars, Vaughn and Stiller. It’s unfortunate there isn’t much more of Torn, as he really started to lift the film with humour, something that it sorely lacks,

I am at a amiss to understand as to why people find this film funny. Perhaps it’s the universal appeal of an underdog, or the rather tired and pathetic jokes used in the film. References appeal to the toilet humour side of comedy, which is fine if it is amusing, but in this case, the jokes miss more than they hit. I did enjoy the mockumentary approach to some of the scenes, and they had an air of tongue-in-cheek, but for the most part this film is rather passive and decidedly average.

For many, this film will probably translate as Zoolander with fashion being replaced with dodgeball. That had some pretty good humour, camped up and avoiding any seriousness about having an actual story. I think this is the failure with Dodgeball, as at times it tries to interweaves some sort of sympathy for the characters, which never works. Instead it makes the comedy sterile, and it never quite lives up to the ludicrous heights of Zoolander, another Stiller production and also staring Christine Taylor.

The film is rather slow, and doesn’t really entertain until the introduction of Rip Torn as Patches O’Houlihan, who comes across as a brash and slightly disturbed ex-dodgeball champion

Stiller comes across as an over-the-top, self-conscious maniac, with only a few jokes really coming off well. Vaughn plays a pretty good down-on-his-luck guy, doing the bare minimum he can to get by in order to survive. The remaining co-stars are stereotypes of what the trendies and the populace deem as losers, who will go from ugly duckling to swans. In theory, or in a romantic idealistic belief. It’s a quite a sad mob of people, and I’m slightly tired of seeing the same old characters, in the same old stereotypes.

The film does have some good moments, granted, but these are mostly when the tournament takes place, even the humour is few and far between. However it would be good to see Stiller make something different instead of recycling the same old nonsense time after time. Most of the cast is actually wasted, with the core of the moronic entertainment being brought to screen by Stiller himself. I don’t find Stiller particularly funny as it is, however, he does have his moments, and I did find Zoolander a stupid, but amusing film, perhaps helped in part by Owen Wilson.

I wasn’t expecting a serious film, nor one that had a real plot. I knew what to expect, but I found it below par, of even my own expectations. The highlight is most definitely Rip torn, but I wouldn’t suggest anyone pay a cinema ticket to see just that. It just seems to try far too hard to be funny for my liking, which is far too in your face to come across as humourous, and instead turns out to be torturous.

Verdict: Missing humour and quite a bore. There are better comedies out there.