Jeremy’s Tophunder №33: Dodgeball

7 min readMay 26, 2020

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story holds the title for the movie that climbed the most spots between my first draft of this list and the final rankings I decided on back in mid-March.

The first time I ever made a Tophunder list for movies was (I believe) way back in 2016. Over the years I’ve gone through a number of different iterations and drafts (and even over the course of this project, I’ve noted a few movies that probably deserve to be ticked up or ticked down). Really, the list that we’re operating under for these write-ups is Tophunder Movies 5.1, or something in that neighborhood.

I believe I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll go over it again here — I started the initial Tophunder with a list of 250–300 movies. I just wrote down any movie I would conceivably consider for the Top 100, which really means any movie I had seen more than twice. If you watch a movie three times, it probably means you like it at least a little bit. So I kind of ended up with three lists. The Top 100, then a list of movies that I’d call “Honorable Mention, And Close” (which was probably close to 100 movies long itself), and then “Honorable Mention, But Not That Close,” which was all of the rest of them.

On my first pass through the list, not only was Dodgeball not in the Top 100, it probably wasn’t even in the Top 200.

So how did it end up -this- high?

To me, Dodgeball is a very rare comedy, in that I think it’s actually gotten funnier over the years. I remember liking it just fine when I saw it the first time (probably in high school, I don’t remember exactly), but at that point it didn’t hold a candle to Anchorman or Wedding Crashers or Dumb & Dumber or even Zoolander or Euro Trip. It was an acceptably funny movie, but not especially close to the conversation for my favorite comedy. Today, it’s the second-highest ranked comedy on my list, behind The Other Guys.

Ben Stiller as White Goodman was always funny, but now I might rank him as the funniest character in any movie, ever. I haven’t put quite enough thought into it, but he’s certainly in the conversation. Part of the reason is one of my roommates in college, who could adopt Goodman’s voice and mannerisms to a degree that was rather incredible. There was at least one occasion that he came out of his room holding a dictionary, telling anyone within earshot, “I like to break a mental sweat, too!” It’s almost at a point where I can’t watch Dodgeball and not just think of my old roommate.

The chemistry between Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor is fantastic. Obviously, they were married at the time (sadly, they’re now divorced), but watching Taylor be absolutely repulsed by everything Stiller does is just another layer of comedy in an already funny movie.

Truly, the funniest part of the movie, though, is the dynamic between the two dodgeball tournament announcers, Cotton McKnight (Gary Cole) and Pepper Brooks (Jason Bateman). Bateman in particular is just so perfectly wacky, and he basically steals the movie. If you want, flip through Jason Bateman’s filmography and try to find a movie or show where he plays anything other than the straight-man. I’ll save you some time — you wont find one. I mean, sure, in some roles he is a bit less buttoned-up, but there’s nothing else in his career that comes anywhere close to matching how ridiculous he is in Dodgeball. I really wonder where it came from, and whose idea it was to cast him in the role.

According to Bateman, he was only on the set for about three or four hours, which is absolutely incredible to think about. The production schedule for a movie like Dodgeball is probably several weeks long, perhaps as much as two months. And Jason Bateman comes in and cranks out all of these lines in one afternoon.

My favorite moment in the movie is one that you probably never even noticed. In ancient Greek theater, there was a method of suddenly wrapping up seemingly unsolvable plot points by having actors portraying Gods descend from the ceiling or rise through a trap door and present the characters with simple solutions to all of the stories problems. It came to be known as “Deus ex Machina” (God from the machine), and it has come to be used to derisively describe lazily resolved conflicts or, perhaps more broadly, give an undeserved happy ending to the story and the characters. As a hypothetical example, imagine if Harry Potter discovered late in the last book that Voldemort was deathly allergic to peanuts, and killed him by throwing peanut dust in his face. That’s a Deus ex Machina.

So where am I going with this?

After the championship match, when White Goodman is gloating about Vince Vaughn signing over his gym the night before, it looks like GloboGym “won” after all. Average Joe’s Gym will have to close, even though they made the $50,000 they needed to keep it open. But that can’t be, because this is a feel-good comedy movie, so there needs to be a happy ending. Suddenly, casino employees wheel a giant chest out onto the court, and open it, showing $5 million in cash, which Vaughn had won by betting on Average Joe’s to win, using the cash that Goodman had bought out his gym with. Now all of a sudden, they don’t just have enough money to save Average Joe’s, they have enough money to buy out GloboGym. The good guys win!

You could probably interpret this as a Deus ex Machina. I certainly would. And so would the filmmakers.

Allegedly, Average Joe’s were supposed to lose in the end. After all, it’s “A True Underdog Story,” and underdogs usually lose. The writer/director (Rawson Marshall Thurber) pitched the movie that way to studios. There’s even a bootleg edit of what he probably wanted the ending to look like. It’s unclear how authentic it is — it claims to be one of the deleted scenes included on the DVD, but I wasn’t able to verify that. Anyway, here’s what it looks like:

Obviously, the studio executives hated the idea. As the story goes, Thurber wanted to subvert expectations and have the ending be the final big joke. But nobody would let him do it. So he wrote a new ending for the movie, in which the team gets a second chance thanks to a lame technicality, win the game in serendipitous fashion, and then win their gym back thanks to an out-of-nowhere windfall of cash. But he did it in a way that had a few hidden (or maybe not so hidden) middle fingers to the executives that wouldn’t let him have the ending he wanted.

There are a few just random Easter Eggs of hilarity interspersed throughout the movie. At the very end, when Vince Vaughn is giving the tour of the new Average Joe’s gym, Justin and Amber walk behind him, and Amber is pregnant. It’s just a random throw-away joke that lasts maybe a second. Before the first dodgeball game of the Vegas tournament, a PA announcement includes “All players must be vaccinated for cholera, syphilis and shingles before play begins. Again, dyslexic players will not be allowed on the court.” You barely hear it because there’s dialogue and music and other ambient noise, but if you pay attention you can hear it. It’s this kind of stuff that gets me more and more every time I watch the movie.

So, yes, I was late to the party on Dodgeball. I apologize for this. I should have realized sooner what a work of true genius it was. But I did come around eventually. I made myself bleed my own blood, I hit myself with some knowledge, and it was convenient for me — and the clock. Dodgeball isn’t the funniest movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s one of the most rewatchably funny movies I’ve ever seen, and that’s what matters here.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall