Benchwarmers

Benchwarmers

A good reason to tread lightly...

Where do I even begin with this movie? Well, first of all, in challenging myself to review underrated comedies, I learned that I have exquisite taste in movies. I’m serious! I looked long and hard through all the movies I own and very few of them had less that a 70% audience rating on rotten tomatoes! That’s made finding appropriate movies a difficult thing and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to review this movie, but my options are somewhat limited in terms of what I actually own. (I’m terribly picky about what I’ll buy on DVD or bluray.) I know this movie is probably going to be a hard sell for some people. Initially, it was for me too, but with an open and unbiased mind, perhaps you can start to see the good that this film has to offer as well.

So what is this movie all about and why did it make my cut off for underrated comedies? Well, this movie, along with a handful of others manages to successfully recapture a few ingredients from film that had faded out by that point. The movie is produced by Adam Sandler, whose star was on the decline by that point and it starred Rob Schneider, who’s never made any other films that I’ve seen and enjoyed. Please feel free to comment if there’s one that you think is worth note, but I’ve always seen Schneider as an ensemble comedian. This fits since he got his start on Saturday Night Live, and he’s always been great at adding to a scene, but never really at carrying the scene.

Thus, the ingredients being used to make this movie were already offbeat and on paper it all seems like a recipe for disaster. I can easily understand why people would be leery of this movie. Let’s take a look at what’s going on… Rob Schneider plays a plucky landscaping professional with a love of baseball. His main cohorts are Jon Heder, David Spade and Jon Lovitz, who play Clark and Richie respectively. From the get go, it’s established that Schneider’s character, Gus, is the king of nerds. He’s witty, he’s good at baseball, and he takes the lowly under his wing and tries to help them see their own self-worth. Gus, Clark and Richie get noticed by Lovitz’s character Mel beating a little league team and Mel decides to sponsor them. It’s later revealed that Gus used to bully people in school, which gets him kicked off the team. BUT! Gus makes amends with his former victim, gets accepted back to the team and they all live happily ever after. It’s a pretty straightforward concept, but one that’s been known to work really well.

You may be asking why I actually took the time to summarize the plot. Believe me, I’m the king of TL;DR, but in this case, it’s kind of necessary. See, the formula is not all that different from what Adam Sandler used in his ‘good’ movies. Those classics that we all love like ‘Billy Madison’, ‘Happy Gilmore’, and ‘Big Daddy’ all used this same formula. Sandler eventually outgrew this particular formula and as he took for.ever. to realize this… Wait, has he actually realized this? Seriously, I haven’t watched a new Sandler film since, like 2004. Anyway, as he painfully began to age out, it seemed like the formula had become obsolete. But, here comes ‘Benchwarmers’ putting it through one more lap! This seems like it would make for an awful movie and indeed, it’s no classic by any stretch, but just like the subject matter that it covers, it winds up scoring an underdog win.

With all these things working against it, ‘Benchwarmers’ should have been a disaster so why am I here praising it. Well, it manages to recapture the good old days of decent Adam Sandler films using Rob Schneider as a stand in. And I mean ALL the elements are there. There’s the plucky underdog protagonist who scores with a woman WAY out of his league (Scheider’s ‘wife’ is played by Molly Sims), the cameos by SNL alumnists, the tragic mistake that nearly costs the protagonist his success and the come from behind ‘win’. It’s an Adam Sandler film from the 90s minus Sandler. But in this case, it all works really well. It touches on enough nostalgia that I’m instantly transported back to my awkward high school years and that just makes the theme more resonant with me.

The theme is anti-bullying. In this regards, I’m not sure if I should applaud the writers for being ahead of the curve since bullying has been a pretty big issue in recent years. I’d definitely say that this movie covers in ahead of a lot of others and opens up a dialog in an awkward, yet palatable way.It’s the theme that really makes this film stand out as it attempts to teach its audience that we can all have a positive influence on other’s lives if we only help them to see the good in themselves. It’s a surprisingly good platform coming from the same crew that gave us all ‘Little’ Nicky’. Now, it is supposed to mimic a Sandler movie so the humor is low brow, kind of schoolyard humor, and there are a couple of moments where a few gags are taken a little too far, but on the whole, it uses its identity really well. It’s not trying to innovate, it’s just trying to remind us that doing an established things really well can make for a good and enjoyable movie.

There are a few highlights in this movie that I feel I should point out. First, Jon Lovitz’s Mel is the ultimate nerd. When first we meet him, he’s driving a replica of K.I.T.T. from ‘Knight Rider’. Later we see him driving a replica of the 60s Batmobile. Then when we get to see his home, he’s got more nerd swag that I could shake a stick at. To make a short point long, if I suddenly found myself earning obscene amounts of money, I’d be doing EXACTLY what his character was doing. That makes the character extremely relatable because it represents a sort of wish fulfillment for a lot of viewers. Gus is also a really relatable character as the guy who genuinely wants to make lives better for the nerds. Sure he had to learn his lesson by being the other guy, but who hasn’t made some serious mistakes in their lives? Also, Nick Swardson as Howie is a riot! He's a deeply troubled kind of weirdo who learns to overcome his fears and accept himself through the power of external encouragement.

The writing, the pacing, and most of the humor in this movie are really strong. There are a few aspects that are completely over the top, but those exist in just about all comedies, and especially in old Sandler movies. There are a few good lessons to be learned by the end of the film about treating others well, but also the movie tries to teach us that while competition can be good, taking it to an excess is bad, and we should always be having fun, at least in sports. Along with that, it tries to impart that we can have fun even if we’re not winning. That the fun is derived from doing our best and BEING our best,because at the end of the day, we only lose if we stop trying. It’s a very zen sportsmanship message.

With funny moments that are too numerous to list in this short article, and lessons that can help us all to be better, I give ‘Benchwarmers’ two enthusiastic thumbs up! It’s campy, goofy, and sometimes more of those things than it maybe needs to be, and perhaps the humor is not terribly intelligent, but if you grew up in the 90s, it’s like wrapping yourself in a familiar old blanket. I think that is pretty cool. Dust off your mit, grab a tub of corn and give this one a shot! I guarantee that you won’t be disappointed.