.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

At the movies with Mike Lippert:

The Benchwarmers is a miscalculation of mammoth proportions. It is a sloppy, shallow, unfunny, misdirected, one trick pony of a film that, even at a mere eighty minutes, is stretched beyond its breaking point. It has no plot, no purpose, no direction, and no reason for existence, which gets by on the mere fact that it thinks being a moron is funny. However, being a moron has usually never been funny as actors who act like being morons usually do it because they think it is funny, and by the logic of some metaphysical law, a man who knows he is funny is usually never funny.
The joke of the film is that three grown losers who have been picked on their entire lives start a revolution against the popular kids by creating a baseball team, which consists of only themselves. The leader and only one with any talent is Gus, as played by Rob Schneider who, in my review of Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo I called "The unfunniest leading man in Hollywood whose success is based on those who he knows. As long as Adam Sandler is commercially viable, Schneider will always have a role." His other teammates include Richie who is played by the second unfunniest leading man in Hollywood, David Spade, and Clark (Jon Heder who is building a career out of regurgitating variations of his gimmick performance from the overrated Napoleon Dynamite).
As these things go, the team of three is noticed a billionaire named Mel (Jon Lovitz) who turns them into a real team named the Benchwarmers, buys them uniforms and hires Reggie Jackson to train them. I am reminded of the much better film, Dodgeball in which a band of lovable misfits forms a dodgeball team in order to raise money to save their beloved gym. If nothing more, that film was very funny: when an actor like Rip Torn says things like "if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a dodgeball," you know a big laugh is coming because the logic of throwing wrenches is so ludicrous we afford it our humor. In this film, Jackson takes the team in the back of a truck and teaches them to hit mailboxes with a baseball bat. This is not funny; by logic, it's vandalism. Have these men no respect for the sanctity of private property?
What is surprising is that the team of three begins to win all of its games, which in and of itself is not logical in the least bit as Richie who plays back catch, can't catch the ball, and as far as I know, if the back catcher drops the ball it is still considered to be live. The other teams could win on his incompetence alone.
The sole joke of the film, that the overgrown, incompetent losers start their own baseball team is not funny; it has no depth to be funny. This idea is no more than a description on a page which could be funny, if it stared people who were interested in creating lovably offbeat characters who are real in the sense that they don't realize they are characters in a comedy. Those stars are not Schneider, Spade, and Heder who might as well have just looked into the camera and said, "Hey, look at how funny I'm being." There is only so many times that you can watch a grown man in a bicycle helmet let go of the bat as he swings, before you start to wonder when the film will get on with it. Then again, maybe its wishful thinking to assume a film like the Benchwarmers has anything to get on with in the first place.
The Benchwarmers was produced by Adam Sandler's Happy Madison productions and, like all of Sandler's post-Punch Drunk Love material seems to be going in a kinder and gentler direction. The idea that a team of losers would rise up to defeat the popular kids is a sweet idea, which could be made into a sweet and funny film. The Benchwarmers has a heart but doesn't know how to use it. Its biggest flaw is that it spends just as much time mocking the losers of the film for humor than it does standing up for them. None of which is funny, as it contradicts the film's supposed positive message; you know your film is in trouble when the only laugh comes from a moment of irrelevance in which an elderly video store manager announces that he smells cinnamon rolls. The fact is that, the film is so misdirected at times that it could be likened to that old joke sentence, "I'm not a racist, I love n….." This is one of the year's worst films.