Review: The Benchwarmers

Some movies are just mistakes, no matter how good the intentions are. I mean really, how could they go wrong? Everybody loves a good baseball movie, right? Oh yeah, a good baseball movie, that's what happened. Now, granted, Adam Sandler wanted to make this film years ago, with Chris Farley, and that may have worked better. Those were the days where Rob Schneider and David Spade still held some kind of box-office pull, being fresh off the SNL boat and all. But, a deuce of Deuce Bigelow and a failed sitcom (Just Shoot Me) later, and these two just don't carry the same weight anymore. So when Sandler decided to go ahead with The Benchwarmers, he called on the next generation of comedy to fill Farley's oversized uniform. Enter Jon Heder, who has done very little so far to live up to his post-Napoleon Dynamite status as a Comedy God, whoever said that.

So these are the three goobers, Gus (Schneider), a landscaper who is inexplicably married to supermodel Molly Sims; Clark (Heder), a paperboy whose hobbies include nasal spelunking and throwing like a mildly retarded girl; and Ritchie (Spade), a video store clerk with an agoraphobic brother (Nick Swardson, who some may know as Reno 911!'s Terry, the hand-job on rollerblades). They decide to take a stand against some neighborhood bully kids by beating their little-league team at baseball. This draws the attention of a billionaire (Jon Lovitz), whose son is recently and constantly victimized by said bullies. He throws together a round-robin tournament that involves the three men playing full teams for the right to play in his new stadium. Lovitz gets to ham it up, showing off his wealth by driving around in the Batmobile and KITT, and having Star Wars memorabilia displayed throughout his compound. Former late-night talk show host Craig Kilborn plays the same character he did in Old School, a pompous jerk, this time as a coach. There's also a fantastic cameo by Mr. October himself, Reggie Jackson, giving the guys some tips on the finer points of the game, by smashing mailboxes from the back of a truck.

There's a lot of real lowbrow humour here, and that's not to say that lowbrow can't be funny, because it can when applied properly, I'm just saying that when you have a bunch of jokes involving the ingestion of nose gold and the taste of farts, lowbrow isn't that funny. In fact the best laugh I got was when Molly Sims said she wanted to have Schneider's baby. I laughed and I laughed some more. So who knows, maybe if this movie had been made 10 years ago with Chris Farley, and a bankable Schneider and Spade, this film would have been much better, but now, it just looks like Sandler's nepotism gone horribly awry.

∆∆ of 5