After I finished watching Balls Out - which took a great effort not to Walk Out - the key debate for me is who should be more embarrassed: the writer? the director? the actors? whoever is still using Orion's 30 year old bumper? the Kickstarter funders? the costume designer? the people that decided to change the title to Balls Out (capitalizing on a movie title joke that was dumb the first time it was used six years ago)?
I ultimately settled on critics - i.e., the critics, such as the one at the New York Times, that gave this fourth-rate non-comedy good reviews. What were they thinking?
Balls Out is a late night cable TV movie that would fit comfortably in the pantheon of the last ten years of National Lampoon's branded junk. The overarching joke of the movie is that it uses a college intramural flag football team to parody sports movie cliches. Well, that's not much of a joke, really, considering other movies and shows such as Necessary Roughness, Dodgeball, South Park, and The Waterboy have parodied sports movies in whole or in part. So the real joke here is that the coach of the team (who is paralyzed "from the balls down" har har har) is well aware of sports movie tropes and explicitly uses them to coach the team to victory. And if you think that's a funny concept, well, then we'll just say the execution here is quite lame.
There are a few chuckle-worthy gags, but none of the jokes are particularly memorable, and most fall flat. Large chunks of the movie are completely unfunny and boring. Which wouldn't be so painful by itself but there are actors on the screen obviously trying really, really hard to be funny and they're failing miserably.
Chief among those actors that should feel embarrassed are Saturday Night Live stars Kate McKinnon and Beck Bennett. SNL cast-member Jay Pharoah also shows up for a lame sportscaster bit but his part and his effort are so insubstantial that he does not suffer so much (and perhaps was aware of how stupid the whole thing is).
Bennett in particular is given little material to work with and so he tries to amp it up mostly by screaming and unconvincingly attempting to ape a super-macho frat boy. It's jaw-droppingly bad and suggests Bennett is incapable of any nuance that might have brought a modicum of humor to the character.
McKinnon, who has shot to stardom via SNL and will appear in a lead role in the Ghostbusters remake, similarly gives a one-note performance. After about a minute or two of her performance as a super-shrill, hyper-aggressive fiancee to the lead character, it's hard to figure out whether she's stuck in the same gear because that's how she's being directed or whether that's the only gear she has. I suspect we'll learn a lot more about that when Paul Feig works with her on that Ghostbusters movie.
No other actor is able to come to the rescue of their character, either. Perhaps getting the worst of it is Nick Kocher, who is forced into the role of the crusty, wheelchair-bound coach. Aside from his "I'm crusty" accent being incredibly grating, he's given nothing in the way of scripted jokes (his big gag is that he keeps talking about pooping on the ceiling). But where he really suffers is in that the role is so obviously a rip-off of the Patches O'Houlihan character from Dodgeball. Thus, Kocher is placed in the unenviable position of trying to live up to the legendary Rip Torn. He doesn't make it. Let's just be charitable and blame the writer.
From a story perspective, the filmmakers fail to find a single smart angle by which to subvert sports movie cliches. That means they're stuck adopting them, leading to the film becoming more homage than parody.But without any funny characters, funny situations, originality, or genuine satire, the whole thing becomes incredibly boring, incredibly fast.
The cinematography is quite odd, as a number of ostensibly exterior scenes look like they were shot on a stage. The lighting is off in a number of scenes, not least in the roller rink scene which, apparently, is supposed to be a signature moment but is only a signature in that something designed to be funny isn't funny at all. The costume design comes in for special notice. It's entirely possible that, absent a budget, the costume designer was forced to let the actors basically dress themselves. That might explain why an alleged high-powered corporate lawyer keeps showing up in ill-fitting suits that look like they've been sitting in the back of a closet for 20 years. I think some of the costuming was intended to be ironic (perhaps in the spirit of Wet Hot American Summer), but it mostly falls flat.
This is not a funny or well-executed movie.
No comments:
Post a Comment