- Studio: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
- Release Date: Jun 18, 2004
- Critic Score
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88Take it from someone who can still feel the hollow rubber tang! of old dodgeball scars: It feels great to be blindsided by a little movie like this.
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83Hilariously fake and rude. And thus true and tonic, if you know what I mean.
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If you hold a perverse soft spot in your heart for straight-to-video underdog junk like "Ski School," you're going to love Dodgeball.
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80Unpretentious, unsophisticated and all the better for it.
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80Dodgeball is the most satisfying comedy of the past year--at least among the ones starring Stiller.
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80The movie's a treasure of small gems.
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75In a miraculous gift to the audience, 20th Century-Fox does not reveal all of the best gags in its trailer.
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75There are some clunky, juvenile jokes and an excess of shots to that special place on men that make us double over and weep. But there are some very funny, very hip jokes as well.
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75Ben Stiller is like a guy on the 1919 White Sox. He's rigged to lose. His comedy is the stuff of failure, and sometimes it's pleasurable watching him flit around in funny get-ups, only to have a pretty costar put him down.
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75A blistering satire of feel-good sports movies, this film makes its mark via the most direct route: it lampoons by adopting the tried-and-true "straight" formula and tweaking it a little.
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75Pointed and satiric. Best of all, one must hasten to admit, it's pretty funny.
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70Strangely exhilarating.
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70Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber (the short "Terry Tate: Office Linebacker") keeps the jokes coming fast and furious, and while none of them are deep, many find their mark.
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70Gleefully commingles slapstick and scatology, satire and sentiment, in a free-wheeling farce aimed at making auds laugh until they're thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
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67It may not be original, but it's often shamelessly funny and more clever than I expected. Not much, mind you, but enough to catch me off guard with a few surprise throws.
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63Coach Torn adds to a palpably violent undertone by heaving wrenches at their heads and crotches, making The Three Stooges' poking and slapping look downright tame.
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60Nobody eviscerates the scary depths of male narcissism with such ferocity, and it is a huge relief to find Mr. Stiller flexing his oiled, low-comedy triceps with such vengeful glee.
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50In outline, the story is pretty funny, and the film's outlandish takes on sports-movie conventions deliver some laughs. But Thurber chooses the low road to those laughs so often that he undermines his own satirical design. His actors certainly deliver amusing, spirited performances, but again, they get done in by relentless adolescent humor.
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50In Dodgeball, Vaughn is stuck playing the straight man to a collection of stooges, and he looks utterly bored doing it.
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50Yes, the movie's watchable, and there are about six good laughs in it, but six good (not great) laughs in 90 minutes is pretty paltry for a comedy.
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50Much of Dodgeball feels competent but lazy. The nerds are barely distinguishable, except for one who thinks he's a pirate and says arghh a lot to no humorous effect.
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50The movie veers from cleverness to crass stupidity. You can never tell whether the next scene will induce loud laughter or contempt; for me, Dodgeball divided right down the middle.
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50There's a place in life for movies like this – goofy and lowbrow but never truly icky; the good guys are lovable losers and the bad guys have frosted feathered hair and unitards with inflatable codpieces.
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50Mostly, Dodgeball just feels off--never consistently funny, but also never dire. It's as if Thurber resigned himself to making a dumb, formula-bound movie with a dusting of smart gags instead of a smart movie in dumb-movie clothes.
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50It's coarse, primitive, regressive, often very stupid, and sometimes, against all odds, really a hoot.
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50Modestly amusing teen summer comedy.
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50As the WWF-style villain, Stiller misfires again and again, but Vaughn is reliably funny and Rip Torn has a great part as the underdogs' crotchety old coach.
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40Be warned: The end credits contain a particularly nauseating image you'll wish you could delete from memory.
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40For a while, Vaughn's slobbo guy charm and Stiller's creepy Flash Gordon aesthetic are amusing, but it isn't long before Vaughn looks like a Bill Murray disciple trapped among circus freaks, and Stiller runs out of weirdo tricks.
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38Stiller, a DodgeBall producer, is revealing an unfortunate craving for the cheese of his childhood.
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38Ben Stiller's overbearing schtick officially reaches its expiration date with the desperate and puerile Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.
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Anyone with a sizable role in Dodgeball gets mired in the script's dissipated tone. Two of the climactic jokes involve "Happy Days" references. How tenuous is that?
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25Stiller strives to be a wild and wacky villain, Vaughn endeavors to be a likable and average hero, and both fall flat on their faces, like everything else in this unspeakably stupid comedy.
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10Mean-spirited vulgarity and homosexual panic.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 66 out of 90
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Mixed: 9 out of 90
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Negative: 15 out of 90
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7This movie is stupid but in a good way that will keep you glued to the screen.
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8"Dodgeball" turns out to be a healthy showcase of all kinds of humor from an interesting cast of characters.
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This is great Stiller. He's not just funny, he's electrifyingly hilarious. Dodgeball's his best work since Zoolander.