Joel on Film

Early on in Balls Up, there is an entire joke dedicated to the idea of our bumbling pair of protagonists inadvertently halting another man’s nine-year stretch of sobriety, though it hardly ends there. The man doesn’t just drink the champagne he said he would smell—he also ingests quite a lot of crack cocaine, strips naked during a public function, and swings like Tarzan from an upper floor to the lower one, completely out-of-his-mind wasted. Later, when our heroes have been fired for their exploits, one of the “punch lines” to the whole experience is that their sick colleague, who requires dialysis, may soon die without health care coverage—and blames them, perhaps rightly, for that inevitable demise (we never see him again, by the way).

Before we even get to the plot of Peter Farrelly’s film, then, the movie has loudly announced exactly the experience we should expect to receive, then proceeds to provide that experience without trying to subvert it in just about any way. Farrelly, as it happens, was once one-half of a pair of sibling directors who knew just how to tiptoe the line between sincere and caustic, but it seems that their creative split has caused an imbalance. At least, that’s the only believable explanation for how we ended up with this unholy and deeply unfunny mess.

In theory, pairing actors as different as Mark Wahlberg and Paul Walter Hauser together is a good idea and even one that both this Farrelly and his brother might have accomplished with some aplomb in the past. They play, respectively, Brad and Elijah, a pair of marketing executives for a prophylactics company, each of whom has part of an idea—eventually combined when they agree to work together—about a condom that, let’s just say, offers full coverage of the downstairs-front-door business. Yes, in case that doesn’t indicate enough about what we should expect, this is a constantly, overwhelmingly, and repetitively crude movie, leaving no stone unturned in the bad-taste department.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that, by the way, as even previous movies directed or co-directed by Farrelly (some of which are bona fide comedy classics at this point) have proven. In this case, it might be an example of too much muchness for the constitution of the movie to handle. This movie is an absolute barrage of ideas as crude as they are random, held together by the thinnest plot imaginable (from a screenplay by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick).

Basically, the idea for the condom is attached to the company’s desire to sponsor the World Cup being held in Brazil, and so, months after the wacked-out wild antics of that party (where Benjamin Bratt plays the sobriety-rupturing executive from whom the pair seek sponsorship) cause a rupture in the friendship, Brad and Elijah are both invited to enjoy seats at the big game. Their own stupidity causes Brazil’s team to lose. That, in turn, marks them as targets of ire across the country, whose citizens recognize them both instantaneously and turn, mindlessly, to vengeful madpeople.

There’s obviously a twinge of racism to that idea, not to mention a whiff of misogyny when Daniela Melchior turns up as a helpful lawyer, only for the movie to forget about her character for so long that a “big twist” about her character right at the end of the movie falls completely flat. Elsewhere, Brad and Elijah get into a spot of bother with a cocaine empire (whose leader is played by Sacha Baron Cohen, putting on a silly accent and doing almost nothing else of note), then with a group of environmentalists who desire only peace—and also instant, public execution for anyone who violates their rules. Remember that this started as a comedy about a couple of guys who come up with an expanded condom wrapper.

The overarching problem is that this is not so much escalation of comedic ideas as it is a non-stop barrage of them, without pausing to consider what’s actually funny about any of it. Balls Up wants to be a foul-minded, potty-mouthed delight but lacks anything resembling conviction.

Rating: * (out of ****)