If Peter Farrelly acquired any auteurist pretensions after undeservedly winning the Oscar for Best Picture with his insincere race-relations road movie Green Book (2018), he has surely abandoned them with his seventeenth feature, Balls Up. Even if the idea of the director behind video store classics like Dumb and Dumber (1994) and There’s Something About Mary (1998) returning to gross comedies sounds enticing, one has to remember that Farrelly was one of the main contributors to Movie 43 (2013), a comedy omnibus as painfully unfunny as receiving a colonoscopy.
While many critics are quick to label Balls Up one of the worst films of the year, it’s perhaps fair to state that, compared to the insufferable Oscar-baiting of Green Book, this buddy road movie is at least transparently lowbrow. As its title suggests, we’re so back to cock-and-balls jokes, with bro-ish toilet humor that makes you wonder if Deadpool (2016) screenwriters Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese never escaped the early days of theChive and Reddit. The only sliver of faint praise left for the film is that Mark Wahlberg and Paul Walter Hauser chew on the remarkably distasteful jokes with a somewhat straight face. The scene in which they are forced to swallow a fairly girthy inflated condom filled to the brim with cocaine — an unexpected cinematic parallel with the present-tense fiasco that is the season 3 premiere of Euphoria — is the exact image of collective suffering one can imagine Farrelly put cast and crew through to deliver this non-film for Prime Video.
Although the opposite might be true, as Balls Up‘s rambunctious journey from Brazil to Argentina also suggests a holiday break, funded through tax write-offs by Jeff Bezos. As employees of a booming marketing firm that evokes the incompetence yet commercial success of Emily in Paris‘ Agence Grateau, designer Elijah (Hauser) and savvy sales guy Brad (Wahlberg) enjoy a complimentary trip to the 2025 World Cup in Brazil to promote their new condom, which covers the entire package from tip to scrotum in high-grade latex. The marketing trip goes… well, balls up, after Elijah ruins Brazil’s shot at the soccer title, turning the initially standoffish duo into the country’s most wanted men. Their attempts to escape a horde of murderous soccer fanatics trigger a tedious journey through Brazil, with exotic locales captured in extremely generic shots that serve as sanctuary for either Epstein-esque drug cartels or tree-hugging oversexed hippies on perpetual ayahuasca retreat.
It’s in the domain of a Brazilian drug cartel that the film grinds to a halt. Against the backdrop of the tamest Diddy freak-off imaginable, Elijah and Brad place their trust in the local kingpin, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, even more annoying here than you’d expect from him at this point. This is where the big condom shit-swallowing fiasco plays out in an absurdly long scene that gives ample time to ponder what happened to the secretly great gross-out comedies of yore. It seems clear by now that the old Peter Farrelly comedies worked only because of the outlandish riffing with his former co-screenwriter, co-director, and brother Bobby Farrelly. Admittedly, with forgettable fare like Champions (2023) and Dear Santa (2024), Bobby isn’t delivering bangers either, but his sense of quality control at least seems to still be intact to some degree. In contrast, Peter has lost the plot completely. His Oscar praise was one of the greatest flukes of recent American cinema. And yes, indeed, his Balls Up sits among the most hideous straight-to-streaming slob of our era. If the banal title hints at anything meaningful at all, it’s at Farrelly’s own career, which sorely lacks the contraception that could protect him from regrettable mistakes like this supposed comedy.
DIRECTOR: Peter Farrelly; CAST: Mark Wahlberg, Paul Walter Hauser, Daniela Melchior, Sacha Baron Cohen; DISTRIBUTOR: Prime Video; STREAMING: April 15; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 44 min.
Comments are closed.