Balls Up Wastes a Great Comedy Setup on Mark Wahlberg

Balls Up is exactly the movie its title promises. That’s both the joke and the problem.

Directed by Peter Farrelly, one half of the Farrelly Brothers duo behind Dumb and Dumber, There's Something About Mary, and Me, Myself & Irene (which number among my favourite comedies), this is a filmmaker who has been making the same brand of film for over 25 years. There was that one time he won an Oscar in 2019 for the comedy-drama-biopic Green Book, a film many argued BlacKkKlansman should have beaten, but Farrelly’s since returned to his wheelhouse. Perhaps, with the World Cup around the corner, this is how Hollywood is getting us ready for it.

Two co-workers in marketing pitch a condom sponsorship deal for the World Cup, drunkenly derail a Brazilian match, and spend the rest of the film running for their lives. It's a brainless premise that used to anchor mid-budget studio comedies before streaming turned everything into content. Those films were dumb too, but they were never this exhausting. On paper, Mark Wahlberg and Paul Walter Hauser as a mismatched odd couple has potential, but on screen, it just has Wahlberg.

Hauser is seriously miscast and not because he lacks talent, but because Wahlberg leaves no room for anyone else. Every scene bends around him, every joke waits for him, every dynamic flattens to accommodate a performer who hasn't evolved beyond playing a louder version of himself. The odd couple formula requires friction, but what we get is one person acting with another existing nearby.

The script, courtesy of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the writers behind Deadpool and Zombieland, banks almost entirely on dick jokes that burn through their goodwill before the first act closes, and repeat rather than land any differently by the twentieth minute.