Back in 1994, director Peter Farrelly made Dumb And Dumber<\/em>: 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<\/em>, Farrelly is seemingly attempting to conjure a similar sort of magic, albeit this time neglecting to include anything lovable \u2014 or, crucially, funny.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n As far as titles go, Balls Up<\/em> is about right. This is a disaster. Having improbably gone serious in 2018 to take home the Oscar for Best Picture with Green Book<\/em>, 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<\/em> scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, but none are present in the will-this-do shrug that makes it to screen.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Comedies don\u2019t need to be plot-heavy or even plot-first, but they need at least a plot \u2014 the very basics of storytelling \u2014 upon which to anchor the comedy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2019s response to seeing one character\u2019s Alcoholics Anonymous chip is to announce, \u201cSays you, pussy!\u201d, before pressuring a recovering addict into breaking several years of sobriety. And we\u2019re supposed to root for these guys?<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t need to be plot-heavy or even plot-first, but they need at least a plot \u2014 the very basics of storytelling \u2014 upon which to anchor the comedy. An hour into Balls Up<\/em> and it\u2019s not clear what the story is even supposed to be. Instead, it\u2019s simply a succession of airless set-pieces, which feel like the first draft of a comedy-writer\u2019s 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 \u201990s 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 \u2018imagine if they were gay\u2019?<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Worse still, the majority of the action takes place in Brazil, with all the cultural sensitivity and international diplomacy that we\u2019ve come to expect of the United States lately. It\u2019s 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 \u2019Allo \u2019Allo<\/em>. Brazilians aren\u2019t the only injured party here; women, too, are completely reduced to clich\u00e9, with all female characters sidelined as mere sex objects, saddled with dialogue like, \u201cI\u2019ve always wanted to fuck the dick off an American.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n By the time Mark Wahlberg is frantically pulling a vampire fish out of his penis \u2014\u202fDirk Diggler would be rolling in his grave \u2014 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.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n The cinematic equivalent of being teabagged without your consent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Marketing executives Brad (Mark Wahlberg) and Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser) attempt to get their penis-and-balls condoms signed up as the World Cup\u2019s official prophylactics in Brazil. When they inadvertently create a footballing scandal, they are forced to outrun a criminal gang. Back in 1994, director Peter Farrelly made Dumb And Dumber: a wilfully stupid, aggressively crude but ultimately lovable comic yarn about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8422,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-47"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Balls](\"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/balls-up.jpg\")
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