Summary
Balls Up is an incredibly low-brow comedy that doesn’t always work, but it’s pitched squarely at the demographic who’ll appreciate the kind of turn-your-brain-off nonsense it provides.
A while ago, I reviewed the movie Train Dreams on Netflix – don’t worry, this is going somewhere – and said that it was basically a lovely movie that was aimed at critics and snobs instead of the typical cinemagoer. Balls Up is basically the exact opposite. It’s a largely terrible movie that critics will performatively hate but is nonetheless designed to be a totally uncomplicated and laid-back good time, the kind of movie you watch when you don’t have the energy to do anything else.
It’s easy to be pretentious about these things, and that’s probably the “right” thing to do, professionally, but it also ignores the reality that there’s very much a place for bad movies, and that, increasingly, the place for them is Prime Video. But Balls Up isn’t incompetently bad, like, say, War of the Worlds, or boringly bad, like Finding Joy, or offensively bad like Playdate. It’s proudly, determinedly bad, treating lowest-common-denominator idiocy as a sort of art form. It’s rubbish in a way that I’m utterly convinced loads of people will enjoy.
Coming courtesy of Peter Farrelly, who, lest we forget, made Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, and There’s Something About Mary back-to-back-to-back, there’s something quite familiar about Balls Up. This is especially true if you saw Farrelly’s Ricky Stanicky in 2024, which felt like the R-rated return to late-’90s form that the filmmaker was looking for after Green Book, which I can’t remember if it’s racist to like or not like, though I concede there isn’t much difference either way. Teaming up with writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (the Zombieland and Deadpool guys), Farrelly is telling a ridiculous story with an extremely thin veneer of topicality that made me properly laugh out loud several times, so what can you do?
Brad (Mark Wahlberg, The Family Plan, The Union) and Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser, Cobra Kai) are marketing guys responsible for pitching a revolutionary new condom that covers the meat and the veg as an official sponsor for the 2025 World Cup. The fact that there was no 2025 World Cup should clue you in to how much official connection this movie has to FIFA, but it’s not really anything to do with football in general, so I wouldn’t worry about that too much.
Thanks to some contrived circumstances, Brad and Elijah end up costing Brazil in the World Cup final against – who else? – Argentina, making them enemies of the state. Some may argue that the fact the entire country is trying to lynch two Americans over a sporting result is a bit harsh on the Brazilians, but as anyone who has ever seen a UFC event in Brazil will know, the chant of “Uh vai morrer” – Portuguese for “You’re gonna die” – isn’t something that Farrelly plucked out of thin air. Anyway, the movie consists, for the most part, of Brad and Elijah trying to get out of the country before they get killed, but that’s rather underselling how weird and ridiculous it all gets.
What Balls Up mostly reminds me of is that Paul Walter Hauser has a very rare ability to make anything he’s in considerably better just by proxy. Even though it’s billed as a kind of odd-couple affair, this is very much Hauser’s movie. Wahlberg, who, to be fair, is no slouch himself in the comedy department, is primarily tasked with reacting to Hauser and the various oddball things happening around them, like a feature-length version of that scene from The Other Guys where he can’t believe that Will Ferrell’s character is married to Eva Mendes. He’s not quite the straight man, since bonkers stuff happens to the character that livens him up a touch, but he’s close enough that Hauser has the chance to steal every scene they share.
This is also a movie that is consistently able to outdo itself in terms of lunacy, which is both a gift and a curse. You’ll be surprised by what starts out as an extended Sacha Baron Cohen cameo and morphs into a ridiculous sight gag of Brad and Elijah trying to swallow giant cock-and-ball-shaped condoms full of cocaine – hey, remember when Wahlberg said that Boogie Nights didn’t jive with his Catholic faith anymore? – but there are a few sequences late on that feel like they’re trying to be outrageous rather than funny.
It’d be a bit ridiculous to claim that Balls Up really highlights the talents of those involved, but it’d be equally ridiculous to claim that it doesn’t work as a comedy more often than not. It’s as low-brow as these things get, but it knows that about itself and is pitched squarely at the audience who’ll appreciate it. If nothing else, at least it won’t get Farrelly into as much trouble as Green Book did. Every cloud.
