Review of DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story (2004) by Palmer R — 12 Jun 2011

Its plot might be kind of dumb, and most of the acting might be horrendously bad, but just like "Austin Powers," another film group that was so bad it was hilariously awesome, Dodgeball succeeds at making you laugh your head off.

Vince Vaughn's gym is about to be taken over by Ben Stiller's incredibly gaudy, overdone gym. So the guys who go to Vaughn's gym go to a dodgeball tournament with a prize large enough to pay the huge debt the gym has. Stiller creates his own team. Stiller loses. Simple plot.

It's just that so many hilarious people were picked for this movie. Ben Stiller's characters starts fondling his privates with a piece of pizza (he's got a pizza fetish, apparently), has an inflatable girdle in his pants designed to trick people into thinking his dong is freakishly large, and when he randomly grabs a book and reads it trying to look smart, when questioned on why he's reading a dictionary, he comments casually, "I like to break a mental sweat, too." As the CEO of Globo Gym, made to look like all those gyms that you just HATE, his ego is so large that you can't help laughing the whole time he's there. With comments like "Nobody makes me bleed my own blood," you're gonna laugh.

There's also the old 1950s style "instructional video" that the dodgeball players at Vaughn's gym watch, with casually stupid rules like "The 5 D's of Dodgeball: Dodge, Dip, Duck, Dive, and Dodge!" All these little things, plus Vaughn being just as hilarious as Stiller and some great cameos, makes Dodgeball the "Austin Powers" of sports movies. And that is a very good thing.