PLOT: Two marketers pitch a bold new condom World Cup sponsorship. After a booze-fueled scandal, they must outrun chaos to survive.
REVIEW: It’s getting to the point where there are few things that I look forward to less than a streaming comedy. If there’s anything that feels right for the theatrical experience, it’s a comedy where you laugh with a group of strangers. It doesn’t help that studios often dump comedies onto streaming services with very little fanfare, often indicative of their quality. And I’m sad to say that Balls Up doesn’t really buck the trend and we’re treated to yet another mediocre to bad streaming comedy.
Balls Up starts off with a bang, with Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser) presenting his, what he views as revolutionary, presentation on a new condom for the World Cup. Why the event needs an official condom is beyond me, but I’m sure the filmmakers thought the joke had longer legs than it does. Elijah’s sales skills are lacking, so Brad (Mark Wahlberg) joins him in order to seal the deal. Things go hilariously wrong in what is one of the more entertaining moments of the movie, with Benjamin Bratt going on a drug-fueled bender. They lose the job but attend the World Cup, only to interrupt the game and cause Brazil to lose. Now, the entire country is out for blood, and the two must try to escape with their lives. If that sounds all over the place, it’s because it is.
The story structure for the film feels very strange, with scenes just kind of crammed together and constantly clashing in tone. One second, we’re in a drug kingpin’s mansion, the next, we’re with hippie poachers in the jungle. And that’s not inherently a bad thing for a comedy, but it makes the story never feel cohesive. Anyone who’s been around the soccer (or football) world knows how seriously fans take their sport. So there’s this constant conflict with the reaction of fans to any sort of humor. You would expect some funny hijinks involving failed disguises, but instead it’s mostly about the two men moving between groups that really don’t seem to care about the incident or actively like that it happened. It feels like the filmmakers don’t know how to properly take advantage of the situation and are too focused on the condom.
Paul Walter Hauser and Mark Wahlberg have a fun dynamic together at times but they both feel like they’re trying too hard. Hauser is usually very naturally funny, but he’s going a bit too over the top. Wahlberg would have served better as the straight man, but it seems like he doesn’t want to miss out on the fun of being ridiculous, so it throws their chemistry off. It doesn’t help that both of their characters are painfully unlikable. Outside of Bratt, the side characters like Daniela Melchior, Eric Andre, and Sasha Baron Cohen never really shine, and they all kind of blend together.
I really enjoyed 2024’s Ricky Stanicky, so it seemed as though Peter Farrelly was finally getting back into the swing of things after years of mediocre to bad comedies. But he shoots this in the most plain way possible, with far too many CGI backdrops and jokes missing the mark. There are times, especially with Cohen, where it feels like he’s just allowing him to improvise into a void, and very little of it actually lands. I also expected more from writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, who gave us the always-solid Deadpool films. The film doesn’t even really have a proper final act, and just sort of wraps up like they simply ran out of runtime.
Balls Up fails to really bring much in the way of laughs, and that’s the one thing a comedy is supposed to do. It’s always so focused on being over the top and crude that it never actually goes for any proper jokes. There’s far too much reliance on the main joke of “Hey, isn’t it funny that this condom goes over the balls too?!” And sure, that’s funny during the opening for a joke or two, but it gets hammered into the ground. Nearly all of the talent on screen doesn’t get properly utilized, and it’s really hard to even care about the situation that Elijah and Brad find themselves in. Hauser deserved better.
Balls Up is Now Streaming on Amazon Prime.
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