Review: Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
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This is meant to be silly fun -- teens and parents who love Adam Sandler-style humor will enjoy it very much. Those who don't should avoid it. The movie has some very mature material for a PG-13 including explicit sexual humor with jokes about adultery, group sex, pornography, genital size, bondage, and homosexuality along with some very strong language including many double entendres featuring the word "balls." Characters drink frequently, including drinking to dull pain. The coach taunts the team by calling them "ladies."
Families who see this movie could talk about some of their own experience in feeling like an underdog. What should Pete have done when White made him an offer? Families could also talk about perseverance, and the comment made by one character that "if a person never quits after the going gets rough, they won't have anything to regret for the rest of their lives."
What Parents Should Know
This is meant to be silly fun -- teens and parents who love
Adam Sandler-style humor will enjoy it very much. Those who
don't should avoid it. The movie has some very mature material
for a PG-13 including explicit sexual humor with jokes about
adultery, group sex, pornography, genital size, bondage, and
homosexuality along with some very strong language including
many double entendres featuring the word "balls." Characters
drink frequently, including drinking to dull pain. The coach
taunts the team by calling them "ladies."
Families who see this movie could talk about some of their own experience in feeling like an underdog. What should Pete have done when White made him an offer? Families could also talk about perseverance, and the comment made by one character that "if a person never quits after the going gets rough, they won't have anything to regret for the rest of their lives."
Common Sense Media Review
Think
Bad News Bears crossed with
Happy Gilmore. Except with dodgeball, which means
many, many opportunities for humorous slams to the head, chest,
and crotch. That pretty much sums it up.
Pete (Vince Vaughn) is about to lose his gym, the comfy hang-out "Average Joe's," to White (Ben Stiller), the owner of the uber-exercise facility known as Globo Gym (slogan: "We're better than you are!") To save the gym, he needs $50,000 in 30 days. And that just happens to be the purse for the winner of the big dodgeball tournament that one of Average Joe's regulars finds in the pages of his Obscure Sports Quarterly magazine.
So Pete and his gang of misfits decide to take their shot. The group includes Justin (Justin Long of television's "Ed"), Stephen Root ( Office Space), and Steve the Pirate (Alan Tudyk), a guy who refers to himself in the third person and thinks he is a pirate. After winning the qualifying regional title on a technicality, they are approached by the world's greatest dodgeball coach (Rip Torn), who reminds them that "dodgeball is a sport of violence, exclusion, and degradation" and in just three weeks turns them into a lean, mean, fighting machine. Or at least into a group that can duck when a wrench is thrown their way. And they pick up a new team member who can throw very, very hard.
Then it's off to the big game, with preliminary skirmishes before facing the Globo team, men-mountains who all have names like "Laser" and "Taser" plus a unibrowed woman with very bad teeth.
