Balls Up

What makes the experience all the more wretched is the sheer filmmaking incompetence on display here. There is no narrative structure to speak of. Comedies don’t need to be plot-heavy or even plot-first, but they need at least a plot — the very basics of storytelling — upon which to anchor the comedy. An hour into Balls Up and it’s not clear what the story is even supposed to be. Instead, it’s simply a succession of airless set-pieces, which feel like the first draft of a comedy-writer’s pitch-meeting whiteboard: what if a football mascot looked like a dick? What if a CG alligator ingested a massive amount of cocaine? What if a tin-eared ’90s conception of eco-warriors licked frogs? What if two men were forced to stuff penis-and-balls-shaped condoms down their throats, the entire joke appearing to be ‘imagine if they were gay’?