Balls Up

Back in 1994, director Peter Farrelly made Dumb And Dumber: a wilfully stupid, aggressively crude but ultimately lovable comic yarn about a couple of bros who find themselves in a series of high-stakes hijinks. With Balls Up, Farrelly is seemingly attempting to conjure a similar sort of magic, albeit this time neglecting to include anything lovable — or, crucially, funny.

As far as titles go, Balls Up is about right. This is a disaster. Having improbably gone serious in 2018 to take home the Oscar for Best Picture with Green Book, Farrelly appears to be attempting to summon the spirit of his 1990s gross-out heyday, with genuinely nightmarish results. Perhaps there were at one point some jokes in the script by Deadpool scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, but none are present in the will-this-do shrug that makes it to screen.

From the moment we are introduced to Brad (Mark Wahlberg) and Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser), we witness nothing approaching any kind of actual character trait, the filmmakers instead incorrectly surmising that repeated jokes about condoms are enough to keep the ship afloat. All we know about our dumber-and-dumberer duo is that they sweat a lot and are generally obnoxious. Brad’s response to seeing one character’s Alcoholics Anonymous chip is to announce, “Says you, pussy!”, before pressuring a recovering addict into breaking several years of sobriety. And we’re supposed to root for these guys?

What makes the experience all the more wretched is the sheer filmmaking incompetence on display here. There is no narrative structure to speak of. Comedies don’t need to be plot-heavy or even plot-first, but they need at least a plot — the very basics of storytelling — upon which to anchor the comedy. An hour into Balls Up and it’s not clear what the story is even supposed to be. Instead, it’s simply a succession of airless set-pieces, which feel like the first draft of a comedy-writer’s pitch-meeting whiteboard: what if a football mascot looked like a dick? What if a CG alligator ingested a massive amount of cocaine? What if a tin-eared ’90s conception of eco-warriors licked frogs? What if two men were forced to stuff penis-and-balls-shaped condoms down their throats, the entire joke appearing to be ‘imagine if they were gay’?

Worse still, the majority of the action takes place in Brazil, with all the cultural sensitivity and international diplomacy that we’ve come to expect of the United States lately. It’s hard to say which is the grimmest regional stereotype, but perhaps the worst offender is Sacha Baron Cohen as a long-locked gangster kingpin, whose joyless comedy accent approach is Borat by way of ’Allo ’Allo. Brazilians aren’t the only injured party here; women, too, are completely reduced to cliché, with all female characters sidelined as mere sex objects, saddled with dialogue like, “I’ve always wanted to fuck the dick off an American.”

By the time Mark Wahlberg is frantically pulling a vampire fish out of his penis — Dirk Diggler would be rolling in his grave — all hope is lost. Even by the piss-poor standards of some of the straight-to-streaming slop of late, this is a miserable experience for everyone involved. Balls Down, more like.