'Dodgeball' keeps humor through to finish

By Bruce Newman
Knight Ridder Newspapers

DODGEBALL: A TRUE UNDERDOG STORY Rated: PG-13 (rude, sexual humor, profanity) Cast: Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Rip Torn, Christine Taylor Writer-director: Rawson Marshall Thurber Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes

It is this third category into which "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story" flings itself. It is a bruising comedy that can leave you aching with laughter, or just aching, with subdural humortomas.

Pure silliness must be the hardest kind of comedy to do well, judging by its almost complete absence from American movie screens since "Ghostbusters" in 1984 and, before that, "Caddyshack" in 1980. At some point, gross-out became the new silly, and it's probably no accident that the Clark Gable of both genres — Ben Stiller — stars here, as he did in the last great silly grossfest, "There's Something About Mary."

As anyone who has ever loved the Three Stooges knows, there's something about watching another human being getting his soft tissues pulverized by hard objects that is an amazing amount of fun. I can't account for this, I can only apologize for enjoying it. If you want to think, go see "Since Otar Left."

"Dodgeball" couldn't withstand the weight of a real plot, so its premise is kept paper-thin: Nice guy Peter LaFleur (Vince Vaughn) owns Average Joe's Gym, but he's about to lose it in a bank foreclosure unless he can come up with $50,000 by the end of the month.

Peter would have to get motivated to become an underachiever, and his motley membership is a confederation of dunces. The gym is a carbuncle on the totally toned backside of White Goodman (Stiller), whose Globo Gym embodies the Nazification of the American fitness movement.

White's hair is a frosted blend of `70s shag and power-mullet, and his eyes burn bright with an intensity that does not come from intelligence. A recovering overeater, White has turned his personal credo into his business mantra: "Here at Globo Gym, we're better than you! And we know it!"

Stiller has played a succession of losers in such recent pictures as "Along Came Polly," but he has a reptilian quality that makes this clueless winner his most memorable character. Not that he wins them all. When White shows up unexpectedly at the home of the banker he fancies — she's played by Christine Taylor, who is married to Stiller in real life — his macho moves are easily rebuffed as she reaches out and smashes his face against a wall.

As Peter arrives for what will be the beginning of his courtship with Christine, White leaves, threatening vengeance. "Nobody makes me bleed my own blood!" he hisses. "Nobody!"

Most of the verbal sparring in the movie is done in that sort of non sequitur, and many of the best lines in "Dodgeball" cannot be repeated here. But they are sophomoric in the best sense.

The dweebs at Average Joe's decide they won't let their gym become the new Globo parking lot without a fight, but their first attempt to raise money is woefully misguided — a bikini carwash with no scantily clad women, just dorks in Speedos.

But then Gordon, one of the feebs at Joe's (played by Stephen Root, who seems to be doing an extended tribute to Rick Moranis' character from "Ghostbusters"), discovers that the prize for winning the national dodge-ball championship just happens to be $50,000.

Talk about a coinkydink! The guys assemble to watch an old training film starring a then-young legendary dodge-baller, Patches O'Houlihan (Hank Azaria). But the Joes' match against a Brownie troop is suggestive of a desperate need for a coach, andwhen help arrives, it comes in the grizzled form of the now-frayed Patches (Rip Torn).

Patches does not appear to be bound by any conventional coaching orthodoxies. He sits in a wheelchair and flings insults and tire irons at his team, explaining, "If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball."

At this point, the movie becomes painfully funny, and stays that way through most of the dodge-ball tournament in Las Vegas. When the Average Joe uniforms get mixed up with the bondage and discipline gear of another group, the team has to take the court in leather and chains. The tournament is being broadcast by ESPN8, which its commentators refer to as "the Ocho," and when one of the geekier Joes dodges a ball thrown at his midsection, the Ocho's analyst exclaims, "Good move by the submissive!"

An even better move would be to give this very silly movie a try.