Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story

Trash comedies such as this are usually more painful than funny, but writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber pulls enough hilarious gags and cameos out of his gym bag to qualify his first feature as the summer’s first guilty pleasure. Facing a hostile takeover of his bankrupt Average Joe’s Gym, owner Peter (Vince Vaughn) and his core of misfits grab their rubber balls and head to Las Vegas in an attempt to win ESPN 8’s (dubbed The Ocho) $50,000 tournament purse. Rival fitness-center owner and corporate jerk White Goodman (Ben Stiller in an appalling mullet) enters his own steroidal thugs into the fray, while Thurber drills us with a steady stream of groin injuries and high-energy lunacy.