‘Balls Up’ Review: Mark Wahlberg and Paul Walker Hauser Bumble Their Way Through Peter Farrelly’s Rote Raunch-Fest

You can imagine the screenwriters of the latest comedy directed by Peter Farrelly imagining what they can do to top his previous work with his brother Bobby. After all, the Farrelly brothers are responsible for such immortal scenes as Jeff Daniels coping with explosive diarrhea in Dumb and Dumber, Ben Stiller’s testicles getting caught in his zipper in There’s Something About Mary, and, of course, Cameron Diaz mistaking Stiller’s ejaculate for hair gel in the same film (my personal favorite).

What the writers have come up with for at least one scene is somewhere in that league, although a little derivative. At a key moment in the elegantly titled Balls Up, Mark Walhberg suffers a mishap in the Amazon jungle when a vampire fish swims up his urine stream and plants itself in his penis. It’s thus up to his co-star, Paul Walter Hauser, to suck the tiny sharp-toothed interloper from Wahlberg’s manhood — which, needless to say, he does only reluctantly.

Sorry if anyone’s offended, but it’s my job to report such crucial things. And to remind you that Farrelly is also responsible for the Oscar-winning best picture The Green Book and that Wahlberg is a two-time Oscar nominee and Hauser an Emmy and Golden Globe winner.

Balls Up, the title of which you’d think would at least merit an exclamation mark, is an attempt to recapture the no-holds-barred raunchiness of the ‘90s and aughts comedies Farrelly made with his brother. It’s a genre that has fallen out of favor at the box office, which doesn’t seem surprising considering that the sight and sound of Jeff Daniels uncontrollably pooping are not things that need to be experienced in premium formats. Hence this film premiering not in theaters but on Prime Video, and not being screened in advance for the press. (What, don’t they think we have senses of humor?)    

Since convention dictates that the plot be discussed, here goes. It revolves around Brad (Wahlberg) and Elijah (Hauser), who work at a condom company in product design and marketing, respectively. Elijah comes up with a doozy of an idea for a new condom, one that covers the testicles as well as the penis, to be pitched as the official condom of the upcoming World Cup. (Again, folks, this is what I get paid for.) Elijah’s preferred name for the condom, “The Testicle Sentinel,” doesn’t go over so well, so the name is changed to, well, check out the film’s title.

A meeting with a top Brazilian official (Benjamin Bratt) goes disastrously when, after proudly announcing that he’s nine years sober, he’s encouraged to merely sniff a glass of wine by fast-talking Brad. His subsequent booze- and cocaine-fueled debauchery, including a naked jump off a balcony, results in Brad and Elijah being fired. The scene isn’t particularly amusing, but it does illustrate that Bratt is willing to go to extremes for a laugh and has maintained an admirable fitness regimen.

The bumbling duo wind up in Rio de Janeiro for the World Cup anyway and, in circumstances too silly to explain, they sabotage the Brazilian team’s chances of winning and are promptly arrested for their transgression. Aptly dubbed “The Stupids” by the entire country, they manage to escape jail only to be pursued by angry mobs. (It should be pointed out that Farrelly deserves credit for not immediately inserting a shot of the Christ the Redeemer statue to establish the setting, although rest assured that he gets to it eventually. Not that the film was actually shot in Brazil.)

Anyhoo, even more would-be comic complications ensue, including Brad and Elijah falling into the hands of a Brazilian cartel leader played by Sacha Baron Cohen, who manages to score the film’s funniest moments with his hilariously unintelligible accent.

The rest of the convoluted storyline includes such moments as the pair being forced at gunpoint to swallow their trademark condoms, filled with cocaine; engaging in a karaoke duet in which they deliver a ridiculously high-pitched rendition of Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”; nearly getting killed by a coked-up alligator (“Did you not see Cocaine Bear?” Brad asks Elijah); and encountering a group of American environmental activists, including a sex-craved female member who gleefully murders poachers. And, of course, the aforementioned vampire fish.

Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who have written much funnier scripts for the Zombieland and Deadpool films, are here working in uninspired mode. Balls Up loses comic steam the more it goes on, and although Wahlberg and Hauser have demonstrated solid comedic chops in the past, their laid-back underplaying fails to provide much juice. Although some of the slack is taken up by such comic pros as Cohen and Molly Shannon as the duo’s profane, politically incorrect boss, this is a film that could really have used the manic energy of a Jack Black or Jim Carrey. Instead of feeling gleefully transgressive, it comes across as just another streaming-era time-filler.