‘Balls Up’ swings big but misses the laughs

“Balls Up”
R | 1 hour 44 minutes
Director: Peter Farrelly
Writers: Paul Wernick, Rhett Reese
Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Paul Walter Hauser, Sacha Baron Cohen

Back in 1994, director Peter Farrelly made “Dumb and Dumber,” a willfully stupid, aggressively crude but ultimately lovable comic yarn. With his latest Prime Video offering, “Balls Up,” Farrelly attempts to conjure that same magic, but the result has a generic, streaming-ready sheen that feels like the first draft of a pitch meeting. It is a movie that tries to recapture the gross-out crown but forgets to pack the heart — or, more crucially, the consistent laughs — that made his 1990s work so enduring.

The premise is pure Farrelly: Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser), a socially inept designer with a revolutionary idea for a condom that covers both the “shaft and the stones,” teams up with Brad (Mark Wahlberg), a hard-charging salesman with the intensity of a man who has not blinked since the days of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. Together, they stumble into a World Cup sponsorship deal for Brazil, only to lose it almost immediately by accidentally ending the cup president’s nine-year sobriety streak. What follows is a chaotic spiral that turns them into the most hated men in South America — “os estúpidos” on the run — leaning into an “ugly Americans” trope with all the subtlety of a vuvuzela to the skull.

If there is any reason to keep watching, it is Hauser. He is a comedic heavyweight in every sense and clearly understands the assignment. He delivers Elijah’s lines with careful precision, lending genuine charm to an otherwise thin character. He even squeezes real laughter out of a scene with a drug lord, which is more than the script deserves. Wahlberg, meanwhile, leans on his usual tough-guy routine, though he is at his best when he embraces the humiliation the script requires. The two share decent chemistry — their karaoke number offers a rare spark — but it is not enough to keep the film afloat.

The real culprit is not the acting. It is the remarkably bland screenplay by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the writers behind “Deadpool” and “Zombieland,” which makes the mediocrity all the more baffling. After a promising first 30 minutes, the structure dissolves into a series of airless set pieces that feel like rejected sketch ideas. What if a soccer mascot looked like a giant phallus? What if a group of eco-warriors licked hallucinogenic frogs? What if two men were forced to swallow ball-shaped condoms in a joke that feels stuck in a 1990s “gay panic” time capsule? By the time Sacha Baron Cohen appears as a drug cartel boss, the film attempts to regain its footing with his brand of over-the-top eccentricity, but it often drifts into “Movie 43” territory, feeling more like a collection of vignettes than a cohesive story.

Visually, “Balls Up” is the quintessential platform movie — critic shorthand for “utterly forgettable” (think “Red Notice” on Netflix). It has the expected raunchy humor, a reminder that Farrelly still has plenty of crude jokes in his system, even if he has run out of ways to make them feel fresh or necessary.

“Balls Up” is a mess, but a mostly harmless one. Its willingness to embrace its own stupidity is its only real saving grace. If you expect a masterpiece from the director who won two Oscars for “Green Book,” you will be disappointed. If you expect a raunchy, crude and occasionally exhausting barrage of cheap laughs, it might suffice. Ultimately, this is a film that will likely be forgotten within a week of its release — the kind of movie that plays in the background while you fold laundry. Asking for full attention would be too much. ♦