Dodgeball
starring Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Christine Taylor, Gary Cole and Rip Torn, with cameo
appearances by Lance Armstrong, William Shatner, Chuck Norris and David Hasselhoff
written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thumber
This movie got consistently bad reviews in the newspapers for its silliness and its unrestrained adolescent sexual humor. But it’s a Ben Stiller movie, after all, so what else do people expect? I giggled with its dumb humor without failing to recognize its stupidity.
Two rival gyms face each other across a street. One, Globo Gym, is a high end health facility. The other, Average Joe’s Gym, is a hang-out of dead end geeks. Globo Gym is a multi-million dollar business. Average Joe’s is about to be foreclosed by its creditors, and Globo is waiting to buy it out and convert it into a parking lot.
It’s a David and Goliath story, and the little guy wins. To raise the money to keep itself in operation, Peter Lafleur (Vince Vaughn), the owner of Average Joe’s, enters a Dodgeball competition.
The prize money is just enough to pay off his bank. His team’s trainer is former world dodgeball champion Patches O’Hoolihan (Rip Torn) who drinks his own urine not because he needs to, but because it’s sterile and he likes the taste.
White Goodman (Ben Stiller) from Globo can’t resist a challenge and enters the competition to defeat and humiliate Lafleur. Violence and humiliation are what dodgeball is all about, after all.
I learned the 5 Ds of Dodgeball:
Dodge
Duck
Dip
Dive, and
Dodge
Good advice, especially if you habitually ride a bicycle on Tokyostreets. Guest appearances by people like Lance Armstrong, William Shatner, Chuck Norris and David Hasselhoff were really neat. I think William Shatner makes a living these days by doing parodies of himself. It looks like he has fun.