Balls Up

2 outta 5

Balls Up is a very dumb movie directed by Peter Farrelly who often tracks in Dumb and Dumber movies (and also Oscar winning Best Picture, Green Book). It has a doofy duo yelling at each other and making horrible decisions that quickly go wrong. It has a tangentially World Cup related plot so it’ll be readily available for viewing when the World Cup starts. There is technically some action here but it is mostly running and shooting firearms into the jungle. But this is really just a buddy comedy movie with a lot of phallic and contraceptive jokes. It is weird and strange but definitely delivers some laughs, depending on how funny one finds condoms to be.

Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser) has created a condom that covers the penis and also the testicles. His boss (Molly Shannon) thinks it’s a great idea and it is up to sales manager, Brad (Mark Wahlberg) to sell the product to the Brazilian businessman, Santos (Benjamin Bratt). After Santos agrees to accept the Balls Up condom as a sponsor, they go out to celebrate, even though Santos is 9 years sober. That ends really quickly when Brad encourages Santos to just sniff some alcohol which leads to Santos going on a bender and ruining their careers. Even though they are fired, they still end up with tickets to the World Cup. And, after being really angry that someone else took their sponsorship, Elijah storms the field to take out the mascot, and they inadvertently ruin Brazil’s chance at winning the World Cup. They escape and end up in the clutches of a criminal gang leader, Pavio (Sacha Baron Cohen). Then there’s a lot of swallowing condoms full of cocaine, escaping into the rainforest and running into radical environmentalists, all while Elijah and Brad are blaming each other for the fine mess they’re in.

This is a buddy comedy film with Wahlberg as the crazy one, and Hauser’s the straight man as he does simmering fury really well. He wants to call the condom “the Testicle Sentinel,” but when Santos doesn’t like it, Brad sells it as Balls Up. Brad is so much of a no consequence guy he really wants Santos to party with them, and a sniff of alcohol turns Santos into a full bender. Santos says “&$#@ it!” and tosses away his 9 year sober chip in an instant and uses it to take shots. The way Bratt’s Santos immediately goes off the deep end, throwing away nine years of sobriety is darkly hilarious.

The movie has so many condom and penis jokes that it becomes absurd. It is one of those running jokes that is mildly amusing at first, then gets overplayed and annoying, and then by the third time it’s hilarious. The script is by Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, who have written some bangers like Zombieland and Deadpool, that very clever movies that twist ideas on genre. This is not one of their smarter scripts; it doesn’t invert or do anything new with the genre. It does still provide a lot of rapid fire gags and funny one liners though, which is good enough for a buddy comedy.

One of the weirder characters here is Cohen’s criminal boss who threatens violence behind an often impenetrable accent. His threats are very polite but still deadly. The way he casually mentions wiping out indigenous folks to make his compound nicer is twisted. There’s also a whole thing where his wife is hitting on Brad which is just a demented psychological kinky game he’s playing. Probably the weirdest scene is when he forces Brad and Elijah to swallow a condom full of cocaine which goes on for an uncomfortable amount of time. There’s some really funny back and forth between the two as Elijah can’t swallow it down and Brad tells his buddy, “Don’t chew it!” Another notable actor is Molly Shannon as their boss and she is just hilariously inappropriate with all of her pronouncements, saying loudly that she doesn’t like the HR rep for ruining their fun while he is sitting right there taking notes.

The film gets even more absurd as it goes on, as the guys pass the coke filled condoms, an alligator eats it and its heart explodes from doing two condoms full of coke. This leads to them meeting crazy environmentalists who kill anyone who threatens their animal friends. There’s a funny running gag about a native the environmentalists have taken in but they don’t understand his language. He gives a whole speech about the dangers of river fish that can swim up the urine stream and, not surprisingly, the guys encounter these fish. It gets very very crude by the end with the fish and penis danger to Brad, but it fits with the tone. Balls Up is not a fantastic comedy and very repetitive with the same penis jokes over and over, but it does provide a few dumb big laughs, which is good enough.