Balls Up - Safe Balls: a slapstick comedy, between football and safe sex

Brad Lewison, a commercial agent with the physique du rôle and unshakeable patter, and Elijah, a hypochondriac and germaphobic producer who has developed a full-coverage condom - capable of protecting the male anatomy in its entirety - are colleagues and rivals who find themselves together presenting the most audacious and improbable sponsorship in the history of sports marketing to the president of the Brazilian football federation, Señor Santos. Their revolutionary condom is indeed vying to be the official sponsor of the World Cup.

And in Balls Up - Safe Balls, the presentation, miraculously, goes well. What immediately follows, unfortunately, does not: a colossal drunken spree with the important sports diplomat leads them to lose the contract, but not the already acquired opportunity to receive two tickets for the upcoming World Cup final, which will be held in Brazil. The final is between the host nation and their historic rivals, Argentina, with the home team's equalizer being disallowed at the last minute due to a chaotic pitch invasion by the two Americans... who now find themselves dealing with millions of local supporters intent on making them pay for that bitter defeat.

Everyone's crazy for Peter

Certainly, since winning the Oscar - perhaps a bit generously awarded in a year that saw at least a couple of superior titles - for Green Book (2018), every new solo work by Peter Farrelly carries high expectations, but his post-statuette career has settled into the decent/mediocre, with a general return to the slapstick comedy that brought him so much success with his brother Bobby. While cult films like Dumb and Dumber (1994) and There's Something About Mary (1998) have entered the collective imagination of the general public, it's unlikely a film like Balls Up - Safe Balls will leave a lasting impression after the credits roll.

Written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the duo behind Zombieland (2009) and the Deadpool saga, Balls Up - Safe Balls had all the makings on paper of a classic exotic action-comedy without too many pretensions. The problem is that comedy has evolved in the meantime, and Farrelly doesn't seem to have kept up with the times here: this farce appears to be a product of the nineties, with grotesque and absurd gags and situations that aim for boisterous laughter, rarely hitting the mark.

The structure of an on-the-road journey in hostile territory, with the football context as the trigger and the continuous leitmotif "it's just a game", which risks causing trouble after trouble for the unwary protagonists - moreover in a country where this sport is experienced even more intensely than here - quickly becomes repetitive. The screenplay is populated by bizarre and one-dimensional characters - the criminal boss played by a wild Sacha Baron Cohen still has his charm - and by situations and plot twists that constantly seek paradox, in that over-the-top spirit that permeates the entire hundred minutes of viewing.

An outdated formula

At times it's funny, but with such an accumulation of gags, it would have been unforgivable if at least a minimum of entertainment hadn't emerged, amidst vulgarity and more or less explicit allusions, with the male member often in the foreground, given the surreal opening. From the second act onwards, Balls Up - Safe Balls becomes an increasingly frantic chase, with an internal logic that progressively thins out until a third part where the mechanism loses momentum, precisely when it should accelerate.

The narrative becomes cyclical and ends up stretching beyond the point of no return, and the editing could have easily cut at least twenty minutes without too many consequences for the characters' fate. The satire on power relations between the Global North and South, on corrupt officials, on American fascination with South American football, and on the Brazilian people's fascination with the Yankee lifestyle is barely touched upon, making the film a superficial and never truly necessary viewing.