Receding Raunch

Say what you will about Peter Farrelly, but the director, who turns 70 later this year, still hasn’t yet aged out of dick jokes, sex jokes, or other forms of juvenile raunch, up to and including putting the word “balls” in the title of a movie. He’s lost the comedic touch that led him to create such comedy hits as There’s Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber in the 1990s, along with his brother Bobby.

Farrelly’s latest, Balls Up, which landed on Prime Video this week, retains all the raunch, but the script’s joke shooting percentage is very low. It doesn’t do anything funny with its promising premise; it fails to get much out of some of the movies’ funniest people, and it’s lacking the underlying heart that the best Farrelly films had.

The opening scene features stars Mark Wahlberg and Paul Walter Hauser as salesmen for an American condom company, trying to secure the contract to be the official condom of the upcoming World Cup in Brazil. (There really was an official condom of the Brazil World Cup, back when it happened in 2014.)

Featuring a condom that also covers the testicles, that opening pitch scene has raunchy sex talk, dildos, and other material that’s on-brand from the guy who gave us the close-up of Ben Stiller getting his balls caught in his zipper. (Wasn’t Mark Wahlberg supposed to be switching to faith-based films?) They get the contract, which comes with free travel, accommodation, and tickets to the World Cup Final, but then they blow it when they cause a Brazilian soccer functionary (Benjamin Bratt) to relapse on drugs and rappel naked across a nightclub.

They’re fired, but because no one thought to cancel their tickets, they head to Brazil anyway, where their stupid antics cost Brazil the match and the World Cup. The film borrows its entire inciting incident from the 16-year-old comedy The Other Guys, in which the same actor, Wahlberg, played a cop despised in New York for accidentally shooting Derek Jeter during a World Series game. That sounds like a lot of plot, but I’m describing only the film’s first 25 minutes; it stretches for almost 90 more minutes.

The conceit of the rest of the film is a platonic male redo of Romancing the Stone: Everybody in Brazil wants to kill them, including the government, the military, drug cartels, a group of radical rainforest activists, and every soccer fan in the country. But nobody does. In a film full of unrealistic contrivances—the World Cup Final has far more security—that might be the most unrealistic of all.

The two co-stars have been very funny before, including Hauser in last year’s Naked Gun reboot, but they get very substandard material, as do people like Sacha Baron Cohen, Molly Shannon, and Eric Andre. Also, the film doesn’t really care about soccer, the World Cup, or modern-day sports merchandising, all of which offer a rich vein of satire.

And it’s insulting to Brazil. The film was shot in Australia, doubling for Brazil, but it doesn’t seem to know anything about the country. I’m not sure whether Amazon plans to make this film available in Brazil. But considering that Brazilian film fans have strong opinions, especially about the Oscars, I can’t imagine it being received there with anything but rancor.

I’m not sure the exact circumstances of the Farrellys’ breakup, but since then, Peter has made an earnest drama that won the Oscar for Best Picture (Green Book), a not great comedy-drama called The Greatest Beer Run Ever, and Ricky Stanicky, an uneven comedy, which also went straight to Amazon, but at least delivered some laughs, mostly thanks to John Cena going for broke. Balls Up represents a huge step down from all of those.