Apparently only happy when he's shredding his dignity ounce by ounce, Ben Stiller returns for a bit of knockabout comedy in the amusing, if unadventurous, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. Sporting the most outrageous wig and 'tache combo this side of a Bruce Forsyth convention, Stiller plays White Goodman, the owner of a chain of fitness emporiums called Globo Gym. A rather highly-strung individual, Goodman has a unique distain for Average Joe's, run by Peter LaFleur (Vince Vaughan). Desperate to turn Average Joe's into another of his outlets, Goodman hires attorney Kate Veatch (Christine Taylor, Stiller's real-life wife) to aggressively force Average Joe's to sell up. Needing to come up with $50,000 quick smart, LaFleur and his nerdy pals note - conveniently enough as it happens - that a dodgeball competition in Las Vegas is offering $50,000 as prize money. To those uninitiated in the sport, Dodgeball is just that - avoiding getting hit by large rubber ball. That the Average Joes have little experience of the sport is solved as the mandatory crusty old champion (Rip Torn) turns up to train them for their day in the sun... Dodgeball may not exactly reset comedy parameters, but there's a lot to enjoy about this brashly goofy comedy. Sensibly, the writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber recognises the limitations of the material and opts for the scattergun approach to comedy. Relentless in its pursuit of laughs, Dodgeball is a knowing pastiche of the against all odds formula, wrapped around a screenplay which the quota of laughs is consistently high. Stiller throws himself into the role of preening villain with a barely disguised glee, and Vaughan exudes an everyman charm that is difficult not to warm to. And anyway, any film with a character called 'Patches O'Houlihan' has got to have something going for it.
