Starring Rob Schneider, David Spade, Jon Heder, Jon Lovitz, Craig Kilborn, Molly Sims, Tim Meadows, Nick Swardson.
Directed by Dennis Dugan.
Oh, I laughed so hard I cried. There were tears streaming down the sides of my face. And just when another film like this might have fizzled out, Benchwarmers redirects its aim from the funny bone to the heart. Then I cried tears of sweetness. I can be such a big baby.
Napoleon Dynamite�s Jon Heder is a wise choice for lead nerd. He�s rock solid funny and will no doubt bring with him a large devoted fan base. David Spade is good, and his scary haircut gets a lot of mileage. Rob Schneider plays the straight man. Jon Lovitz is an excellent cast for the billionaire father of a nerd. Reggie Jackson even makes a cameo.
It�s a baseball, apple pie encrusted revenge of the nerds. This film is 100% silly stupid. If you don�t like fart jokes, don�t go see it. But, as films in this genre go, it�s packed high with funny and warmly with heart.
I liked it all, every bit of it, save for these two exceptions: 1) A grown man sliding into home base to cremate a 12 year old � not funny. Not necessary. 2) Nerds learning to swing a bat by playing mailbox baseball. A little bit funny. Not necessary. Counter to the theme. IE Guys who think they�re tough � do that. Nerds have more respect for other people�s property (and important mail). Would have been much funnier if the nerds learned by hitting pi�atas. (Lots of places to go with that). Or even the �Star Wars� method with that little ball floating around.
I�m disappointed in the film for failing in these 2 areas. But fortunately, the film succeeds on the whole. Funniest film I�ve seen in a while.
Think revenge of the baseball nerds, plus flatulence, if you must think of "The Benchwarmers." Directed, so to speak, by Dennis Dugan, a man who certainly knows how to show Sony consumer products off to advantage, this yuck-fest stars the hard-working Rob Schneider as Gus, a landscape gardener with a mighty baseball swing, and two dumb-and-dumber sidekicks: dumb in this case being Richie, a 39-year-old virgin with a Prince Valiant hairdo, played by David Spade with his characteristic insolent laziness; dumber being Clark, a booger-eating mama's boy played by Jon Heder, using up the last of the 15 minutes he squeezed out of "Napoleon Dynamite." Mr. Heder and Mr. Spade could not be less appealing; Mr. Schneider, on the other hand, is so strangely endearing here that you wish him better management.
The story, cooked up by the screenwriters Allen Covert and Nick Swardson, follows the usual arcs and beats: the three amigos, along with a gaggle of underage freaks and geeks, battle the forces of evil � in this case, jocks who give sensitive souls wedgies and grief � and exit in fist-pumping triumph. After witnessing some Little League types flexing their muscles against a few neighborhood squirts, Gus and his two cohorts form a three-man band to play against the underage mean team. One thing leads slowly and implausibly to another, and, with the backing of an eccentric billionaire (Jon Lovitz, in full lounge-lizard splendor), the trio goes on to create a tournament that will pit them against a succession of young baseball teams. No girls allowed, of course, though a couple of beautiful blondes do drop by.
That more or less sums up what happens, though it doesn't explain the ostensible appeal of a film like "The Benchwarmers," which was, it should be noted, not screened for critics. But why would a studio bother, since movie lovers are clearly not the intended demographic? Produced by Adam Sandler (along with Jack Giarraputo), who certainly knows the value of stupid, this is the kind of juvenile entertainment that will hang around in theaters only long enough to raise awareness for the home-rental market. Filled with sprays of vomit, fountains of spit and enough hot body air to launch a flotilla of passenger balloons, "The Benchwarmers" is the sort of trash that Hollywood does really well. It is also, to quote Mr. Schneider, "a master's thesis on the form of a quintessential Adam Sandler comedy."
As part of the ongoing culture war between aesthetes and vulgarians, the mind and the body, the snooty arbiters of taste and the roaring, belching marketplace, critics were not granted a preview screening of "The Benchwarmers." This total bypass of the organs of discrimination is a growing phenomenon; the studios (Sony, in this case) apparently think it worthwhile to sacrifice the publicity of a few reviews for the chance to make some money before audiences discover how terrible a given movie is.
And so it gives me a perverse pleasure to announce that "The Benchwarmers" is not terrible, not terrible at all. Yes, the plot is terrible, some of the jokes are terrible, and Rob Schneider's bizarre from-the-neck-up oxblood tan is terrible, but the movie as a whole is a more-than-acceptable addition to the genre of shameless and hastily made American comedy. I laughed eight times, and a gentleman behind me was wheezing in delight. Interestingly, "The Benchwarmers" contains its own culture war -- in this case, between the ''nerds," those crash-helmeted human blossoms, and the grimacing ''jocks" who hound them, bent on twisting their nipples.
Schneider plays Gus, a landscaper who gathers his nerd friends (played by David Spade, Jon Heder, and the excellent Nick Swardson) into a baseball team with which -- through his own skill and the magic of nerd luck -- he can wreak revenge upon the bullies and blowhards. Jon Lovitz plays Mel, the team's billionaire sponsor. As always, Lovitz seems to be inhabiting an entirely different filmic dimension, with a strange Brechtian distance between himself and the lines he silkily utters. He is the Jeff Goldblum of vulgarity. "This is music to my ear hair," he announces, with lascivious relish.
There are the usual fart gags and excrement fixations, but there are also moments of beauty. One character describes a cathartic encounter with a longtime tormentor: "As I cowered in my peanut butter fort, he apologized to me. . . ." And the spectacle of defeated jocks groaning beneath self-administered nipple-twists will not soon be forgotten. Craig Kilborn slides across the screen, enjoying himself as usual, and shouts "Let's strap it on and beat these geeks!" Reggie Jackson appears as himself. Pizza Hut and PlayStation are plugged with great assiduousness. What's not to like?
Yet another by-the-numbers, toilet-humor-driven Happy Madison production, but there�s still a heart beating somewhere underneath it all while being exactly what fans of Adam Sandler�s production company expect.
Mild-mannered Gus (Rob Schneider) and two loser his buddies Clark (Jon Heder) and Richie (David Spade) rescue a kid from a team bullying him on a baseball practice field. Gus challenges them for the field: the three of them (the adult losers) vs. their whole little league baseball club (ages 8-13). Gus beats the team with no help from his buddies, a fact not lost on rich guy Mel (Jon Lovitz), the father of the rescued boy. After seeing how mad the little league�s all-American jock coach (Craig Kilborn) was for his team getting beat by three nerds, Mel proposes giving a way a free baseball stadium as a lure in return for the chance to humiliate every little league team in the local area� by three grown adults who likely never got to play as kids themselves. The team�s name: The Benchwarmers.
If that pitch for the plot sounded unlikely, watching it in execution is even less believable. But this is an Adam Sandler-instigated comedy movie, and their are rules to being successful. First act, the set-up. Second act, the over-the-top funny stuff. Third act, tug at heartstrings and wind down the movie. Sprinkle liberously with bathroom humor and intentional one-dimensional characters, and there you have it! But lately there�s been a little more to films produced by Sandler�s Happy Madison production company, and that�s a dose of heart right where it should be. You�d have to be a true black-hearted evil bastard not to feel a little something.
Yes, it�s manipulative, but it works. Go back and look at Sandler�s own 50 First Dates and look at all the missed opportunites to make fun of what must be the funniest brain condition ever� unless, of course, it�s happening to you. By the end of the that film, if you�re not looking away from your spouse trying to hide the tears welling up, you weren�t really paying attention. Essentially, Sandler & Co. have tweaked a winning formula into a true, across-the-board crowd-pleaser with the extra added bonus of pretty much getting away with whatever they want as long the right thing happens by the end. You won�t know whether to roll your eyes or smile like a fool, but you will know you�ve been entertained.
Jon Heder deserves special credit as channeling his Napoleon Dynamite character without duplicating him; Heder is quickly showing strength as a lovable losing straight man that somehow reminds us all of someone we know that always a step behind or not paying attention. Rob Schneider takes charge but refrains from dominating, while David Spade provides a perfect instigator for Heder�s pratfalls. Amazingly, no one group in the film is shown as any smarter than the other, just single-minded in their roles as the jocks or the nerds. Remember, just because you�re big and strong doesn�t mean you can�t be outnumbered and surrounded by enough nerds to bring you down. Kinda like zombies, you know?
Well, outside of the jokes about nose-picking, animal feces, small genitalia, homophobia, urinating in the shower, flatulence, and co-starring the reigning king of unfunny, Jon Heder, Benchwarmers is actually a passably funny motion picture.
After witnessing a local little league team bully a nerd who just wanted to play baseball, Gus (Rob Schneider) challenges the kids to a game to settle the score for freaks everywhere. Recruiting his friends, video store geek Richie (David Spade), and mama's boy Clark (Jon Heder), Gus takes his ragtag team on the road, challenging all comers who want to prove themselves against this hopeless trio.
Well, outside of the jokes about nose-picking, animal feces, small genitalia, homophobia, little people, agoraphobia, urinating in the shower, flatulence, and co-starring the reigning king of unfunny, Jon Heder, "Benchwarmers" is actually a lighthearted, passably funny motion picture.
This baseball flick comes from the Adam Sandler factory, and he's called up two of his best players to write the screenplay: stand-up comic Nick Swardson and Happy Madison regular Allen Covert. This duo also wrote last January's barely acceptable "Grandma's Boy," so they know the ins and outs of fundamental dumb comedy, along with playing directly to Sandler's core audience. The recipe for Sandler-esque cinema isn't complicated; it usually involves a lot of falling down, laughing at the weak, and a substantial amount of bodily function humor. He can also be counted on for some of the best non sequitur humor in the business today, but "Benchwarmers" is more interested in how many fingers it can shove up a nose than to try anything inventively sneaky.
The film is intended for pre-teen boys, leaving the writers and director Dennis Dugan ("Happy Gilmore," "Big Daddy") little room to go for the throat. Sadly, a good chunk of "Benchwarmers" is devoted to poo-poo, pee-pee, and general baseball-to-groin comedy, which plays hard to the mouthbreathers, but leaves out the critical fun factor for everyone else. Sure, watching Heder dig for gold (which, wait for it, he eventually eats) will make a child laugh, but how about trying to make everyone laugh? Sandler is actually capable of achieving this, but his presence here is only as a producer. A shame.
Better is the film's attention to the three moronic lead characters, as they learn the skills of the sport (even of their hands have to taped to the bat) and bask in the riches of their manager, the "Star Wars" loving billionaire, Mel (Jon Lovitz). Letting the actors spaz around the field in the game montages is admittedly pretty fun footage, sold with typical snarky shine by Spade (who looks like he's having real fun here), and a strangely restrained performance by Schneider. As for Heder, I'll be kind and say this: remind me where the appeal is again? As one-note an actor as they make 'em these days, Heder makes Rob Schneider look like a graduate from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Keep on pickin' away, Jon. All the way to obscurity.
The more absurdist gags are still here in the film, just tucked away in the corners so not to distract from moments where Spade gets wailed in the testicles with an errant rock. I loved seeing the richly gifted Swardson in a supporting role as Richie's agoraphobic brother, who thinks the sun is a monster awaiting his every move. There's also a goofy throwaway bit with the team's statistician: a 10 year-old with a spitting problem when he speaks. A final act plot turn, where Gus confronts a mentally iffy little person he bullied as a child, doesn't quite have the hilarity the writers believe it does, but it's a small road bump in a pretty slickly paced movie.
"Benchwarmers" is a truly dumb comedy (even for kids), but in that respect, it's agreeable, even if the film itself doesn't aspire to even that softball level of praise.
No matter how bad a movie is, it can always be made worse with a cameo by Rob Schneider or David Spade. The films they actually STAR in, obviously, are even more alarming. So now imagine a film that stars BOTH of them. A film that was written by the same duo who wrote "Grandma's Boy" and directed by the director of "Beverly Hills Ninja" and "Big Daddy." Surely this hypothetical movie would be so bad, the cameras would burst into flames in the act of filming it.
"The Benchwarmers," an up-with-nerds comedy that meets the qualifications I have just described, is not apocalyptically bad; it's merely very bad. A grown man eats his own boogers and a bully farts directly in the face of another kid -- and that's just in the first five minutes. The rest of the movie is equally fond of bodily-function jokes, and if there's a bad getting-hit-in-the-crotch gag, director Dennis Dugan hasn't seen it.
Schneider, Spade and Jon Heder (aka Napoleon Dynamite), play Gus, Richie and Clark, three long-time friends who are guilty of varying degrees of geekiness. (How they all went to school together when two of the actors are 14 years older than the third, I don't know.) Clark is a paperboy who acts suspiciously like Napoleon Dynamite (way to avoid that type-casting, Jon!), while Richie, with a pencil-thin mustache and bowl haircut, works at a video store and has never kissed a girl.
Gus is actually the most well-adjusted of the group, and you know you're in trouble when Rob Schneider is the coolest guy in your circle of friends. He has a landscaping company and a hot wife (Molly Sims) who wants very badly to have a baby with him, and he also has some athletic ability.
That's how he and the two nerds are able to start their own baseball team to compete against the Little League squads full of mean kids who pick on dorks like them. Gus is basically a one-man team against the entire league, considering Richie and Clark -- his only two teammates -- are utterly useless. Why not fill out their ranks with another six players, no matter how bad they might be? You know, maybe get some KIDS to play on their Little League team? Because watching children play baseball against each other isn't funny, as you know from watching "Bad News Bears" last year. But watching ADULTS play against kids -- now there's comedy!
The Benchwarmers (as their team is called) is bankrolled by a man named Mel, a local billionaire who is played by Jon Lovitz in all his robust, loser glory. Truth be told, I laugh at nearly everything that comes out of Lovitz's mouth, and he's this film's saving grace. His secret? Not trying so desperately to be funny.
Heder is another bright spot, booger-eating aside. He's doing Napoleon, but Napoleon is still funny (though the clock is ticking on that). Like Lovitz, he seems comfortable and relaxed with the material, delivering a solid performance without overselling it.
Spade and Schneider, meanwhile, are at their smarmiest, doing the same shtick they've been doing for, what, 15 years now? Spade is snotty, Schneider is an "everyman"; you know the routine. They both have their moments, but Allen Covert and Nick Swardson's screenplay doesn't give them enough of them, focusing instead on the impossible plot (honestly, outside of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, how does a one-man team defeat a fully stocked one?) and the never-ending parade of scenes where people get hit with things. But hey, at least Adam Sandler doesn't have a cameo.
Believe it or not, The Benchwarmers is so lame that it can't even lay claim to being the best Adam Sandler-produced movie not screened for critics in 2006; that dubious honor would go to Grandma's Boy, which was by no means good but at least featured a kung-fu chimp and naked breasts. Maybe you were hoping that the presence of Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder would amp up the game of the usual gang of Happy Madison idiots (Sandler pals Rob Schneider, David Spade, director Dennis Dugan, and screenwriters Allen Covert and Nick Swardson). You'd be wrong: Heder, who's a clean-living Mormon in real life, does claim to have softened some of the raunchier humor, but all that means is that sexual fluids aren't the subject of any jokes here. Every other bodily emission is fair game.
So if jokes about farting in peoples' faces, graphic scenes of vomiting, gratuitous references to urination and spitting, and Heder picking his nose the whole movie sound amusing to you, this might be your idea of fun. On the other hand, you could just try babysitting a toddler or two instead. You'd get all the bodily functions, plus a sense of humor that's better-developed than Dugan's.
Heder and Spade play Clark and Richie, hopeless nerds who aren't even good at their relatively unchallenging jobs. Clark's a paperboy, never seen without his bike helmet, who still lives with his mother and gets excited about macaroni for dinner. Richie, whose hideous bowl haircut vaguely resembles a bike helmet, is a video store clerk who recommends lesbian porn to female customers. Their friend Gus (Schneider) is a landscaper who appears to be a nerd but, when challenged to a baseball game by some obnoxious kids, proves to be really good at it. Indeed, he's not in the same league as his friends � he has a beautiful wife and a past he's ashamed of for different reasons. This isn't that different from, say, David Spade in real life; Richie may be a 30-something virgin, but Spade has dated the likes of Kristy Swanson. In other words, kids, he ain't one of you, but he gets his fame pretending to be, which turns out to be Gus' major dilemma in the movie.
After beating the obnoxious kids, Gus, Clark, and Richie are challenged by the boys' obnoxious parents, fronted by the smarmy Jerry (Craig Kilborn). When Gus stands up for his buddies, it catches the eye of local bazillionaire Mel (Jon Lovitz), a guy so geeky he collects life-sized Star Wars figures and owns the original Adam West Batmobile. It's his idea to form a team of apparent losers called The Benchwarmers, to give the kids who never get to play ball a chance to be in the game. With a brand-new stadium at stake, he sets up a tournament pitting the three adults against full teams of obnoxious kids with even more obnoxious parents.
If the idea of a team of misfit nerds coming together to play baseball seems familiar, it might just be because there was already one remake of The Bad News Bears, which was a whole lot funnier than this inept, inbred knockoff. A couple of Sandler-movie trademarks are recognizable � there's a foul-mouthed, crazy senior citizen and a gratuitous David Hasselhoff reference. It's symptomatic of how lazy the movie is that we never even learn how Mel went from being a school loser to the richest guy in town. What, they couldn't think of some funny way to make money? No, the "best" joke they can come up with for Mel is that he lives on Shmegmer Street.
Look, it's not like Happy Madison Productions has ever set the bar all that high, but even based on the low expectations a viewer might have based on The Waterboy, The Animal, or Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, this film disappoints. Heder in particular is someone you might expect better from, though based on this and Just Like Heaven, he might want to place his SAG card under glass until the next Napoleon Dynamite sequel.
Scraping the bottom of the comedic barrel, "Benchwarmers" manages to make producer Adam Sandler's movies look positively Shakespearean in comparison. When Gus (Rob Schneider) sees a couple of nerds being tormented by bullies on the baseball field, he decides to give them some confidence by teaching them the basics of the sport. Then Mel Shmegmer (Jon Lovitz), a nerd-turned-billionaire, shows up and offers to bankroll Gus and his friends, and sets up a series of games against all the neighborhood teams. They're soon off and running and, believe it or not, winning, too -- and, not incidentally, providing inspiration to nerds everywhere. However, just as they're heading for the home stretch, a secret from Gus' past pops up, threatening to derail the team's chances of winning the championship.
"Benchwarmers" is idiotic to a fault, offering up tired bodily-function jokes, obvious double entendres and pretty awful performances by Schneider, Jon Heder ("Napoleon Dynamite") as a moronic teen and David Spade as your clich� thirtysomething video store clerk. What it doesn't offer is any reason for making a movie out of this lame excuse for a comedy, which steals (and dumbs down) a lot of jokes from the much wittier "Revenge of the Nerds." It also sends an oddly contradictory message, validating nerds but taking mean jibes at gay people and senior citizens, while tolerating cheating besides. Only the reliably funny Jon Lovitz delivers his lines with any aplomb, providing just a few laughs in this otherwise horrid movie.
Rob Schneider and David Spade welcome Jon Heder into the fraternity of comic actors who will never again enjoy a shred of credibility. In what can only be seen as a mass celebration of fiercely courted obsolescence, cinema's new Terrible Three appear as former bully magnets who lead a bunch of younger dorks in a righteous quest for baseball-diamond dominance. Here come The Bad News Bears to kick all their asses, and yes, we mean the Billy Bob Thornton Bears. Criminally unfunny, the movie is a string of half-baked "ideas" dreamed up by and for overgrown nose-pickers, lent a putrid coup de gr�ce via the casting of child actors who can neither act nor speak intelligibly. Try this for a litmus test of failure: A gay man in a Speedo bounces a midget on his lap and you're still not entertained!
And it's one ... two ... three usually funny guys striking out in the dismal baseball comedy "The Benchwarmers."
I don't know whether to feel sorry for Rob Schneider, David Spade and Jon Heder or just feel angry about a horribly uninspired movie that wasted an hour and a half of my time.
"The Benchwarmers" opened last Friday. But except for a Florida foul-up, it wasn't screened for critics in time for opening-day reviews.
Let's put it this way: This lowballing noncomedy makes "The Bad News Bears Go to Japan" (1978) look like a masterpiece. And that was the third one. Walter Matthau and Tatum O'Neal had bailed long before.
Directed, if we must call it that, by Dennis Dugan, this is a lifeless tale of three ex-nerds generally regarded as losers these days as well. When some macho youth baseball toughs try to push them off the practice field, Gus (Schneider), Richie (Spade) and Clark (Heder) challenge the kids to a game and somehow win.
I won't bore you with how it evolves into a big-deal tournament for all the youth-field marbles. Just know that a former child geek (Jon Lovitz), all grown up and with a nerdy son of his own (Max Prado), gets involved.
Here's the only score that matters: almost zero laughs.
If "The Benchwarmers" were a real ball game, the mercy rule would end the punishment in the first 15 minutes.
It's just sad that co-writers Allen Covert and Nick Swardson, who co-wrote and co-starred in "Grandma's Boy," can't give talented comedians such as Spade ("Joe Dirt"), Heder (come on, "Napoleon Dynamite"!) and Schneider (well, Schneider) some decent comic material.
And when has Lovitz ("Saturday Night Live") ever not been amusing? (Besides here, I mean.)
This is a Happy Madison production, which means Adam Sandler, who takes a producer credit, has delegated yet another underachieving comic product to his gaggle of friends.
Sandler's no fool, though. "Big Daddy" knows which stinkers to stay out of.