I remember when I first saw a promo for Dodgeball. I was in a movie theater lobby when I noticed, standing there behind me, were life size cardboard figures of Ben Stiller – with a partial goatee – and a band of evil dodgeball players and Vince Vaughn with his good dodgeball players. I couldn’t stop laughing the rest of the night. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story really has a funny premise and perhaps the best subtitle ever, but the movie itself doesn’t live up to it as much as it should.

The rather simple story involves Peter LaFleur (Vince Vaughn), whose small weight room business is going under because he doesn’t charge any of his six customers anymore. White Goodman (Ben Stiller), who owns a nearby large-scale gym, is going to buy Peter out unless he can come up with $50,000.

Fortunately, a dodgeball tournament is around the corner and is going to pay $50,000 to the champions. You know the rest of the story from here. Peter and his common folk customers put together a team to win the money, while White Goodman puts together a mega team to try to stop them. The film never takes itself seriously, of course. But it’s so silly; it’s sometimes in danger of not taking itself seriously enough.

It is funny though: sometimes even gag inducing funny. There were periods where I didn’t dare take a sip of soft drink for fear that it would end up in the hair of the person in front of me the next moment. But strangely enough, it could have been funnier.

Part of the humor in Dodgeball is – like all cornball comedies – humor of the extreme. But sometimes it just goes too far. Scenes where the Average Joe’s are in training and getting hit by all sorts of objects in all sorts of places is funny the first time, but the slapstick comedy goes on so long it soon becomes dry.

Stiller himself is occasionally funny as the air-headed weightlifter, but his wordy nonsense is stretched too far and too thin. As opposed to the similar antics of someone like Dr. Evil, who never ceases to be funny, Stiller’s humor runs out by the end of the film.

Many other things are “funny” but never really funny. For example, Having Lance Armstrong himself walk in and ask Vince Vaughn why he’s given up is “funny”, but it’s never worth a laugh.

Dodgeball is a first time feature film by director Rawson Marshall Thurber, who previously directed the Terry Tate: Office Linebacker commercials. So, if you’ve ever seen those Reebok commercials, you’ve got a pretty good idea of Dodgeball right there.

But there’s very little genuine comedy here. One liners and punch lines abound, and are often so banal they can be predicted with ease. Considering its fun, original premise, Dodgeball is as calculated as possible. Some stupid antics here, some slapstick there, a lot of unnecessarily crude jokes everywhere: Dodgeball has managed to be as low-brow as possible in as many different ways as possible.

And yet, I haven’t laughed that hard in some time.

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