BASEketball (1998)
Movie rating: 3/10
I gained a new appreciation for professional film critics watching BASEketball. Sure, they get to write about movies for a living, but they also have to sit through a lot of bad movies. The more films you watch, the more aware you become of recurring formulas, tropes, and clichés. BASEketball has a handful of laugh-out-loud moments, but doesn’t live up to the potential of its premise. The dominant impression wasn’t of the parts that work — there are some genuinely funny moments — but the generic, cookie-cutter product that is the film as a whole.
The movie’s problems begin with its stars. I enjoy South Park as much as anyone, but creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone do not have the acting chops to play the leads in a major motion picture. The duo are brilliant comic writers and voice actors, but I think having them lead a live-action film written by others was the first misstep.
Our protagonists, Joe “Coop” Cooper (Parker) and Doug “Sir Swish” Remer (Stone), are introduced as jobless losers who “haven’t changed high school”, sit around all day playing Nintendo, and are three months’ behind on their rent — all relayed through clunky exposition (immediately breaking the “show, don’t tell” rule of writing). When they invent a hybrid of baseball and basketball played in their driveway, the game catches on and gains a following, attracting the attention of businessman Ted Denslow (Ernest Borgnine) who proposes the creation of the National BASEketball League (NBL). To prevent a decline of the NBL similar to other professional sports, there are certain rules, such as teams being prohibited from switching cities or trading players. But dastardly tycoon Baxter Cain (Robert Vaughan), owner of the Dallas Felons NBL team, plots to reverse the rules against profiteering from the sport.
As I said, there are some brilliant moments in BASEketball. The opening effectively satirizes aspects of professional sports such as corporations getting the naming rights to stadiums — giving us the memorable example of “Preparation H Arena” — and football players dancing when they score touchdowns, with a whole team joining together in a Riverdance-style dance routine. BASEketball was co-written and directed by David Zucker, who also helped make the classic Airplane!. Sadly, BASEketball has much less success in its jokes-to-laughs ratio.
There are other highlights, though. In some cases, it’s acting moments like Robert Vaughan’s wordless expression of disbelief at Remer’s inability to understand his scheme. There are cheap jokes I laughed at anyway, like Cain’s quite literal suggestions to trophy wife Yvette Denslow (Jenny McCarthy) that they “lay some carpet” together or that she “buffer his lobby”. While I’m generally not a fan of comedy music, the songs written by Parker and Stone are an exception: they’re both catchy and funny. That’s the case for the rock ballad that plays during Coop’s end-of-second-act crisis where the lyrics spell out his precise situation. I just looked up the name of that song on IMDb, and it’s called “Warts on My Dick”. Well. Anyway.
The majority of the film, however, is largely laugh-free, punctuated by jokes that provoke mild chuckles at best and severe eye rolls at worst. Compare this movie to something like Wayne’s World, which has a similar plot — two slacker buds find success with an idea, only to bristle at corporate attempts to water down their creation — and you see where BASEketball goes wrong. Wayne and Garth are genuinely memorable characters; Coop and Remer are not. They’re blank slates for the audience and have no idiosyncratic traits that really stick with you afterward. Even the thankless role of “love interest” was better in Wayne’s World, where Tia Carrere’s Cassandra got to sing some cool rock songs and had funny lines like saying she learned English from the Police Academy movies. Yasmine Bleeth has no such luck as Jenna Reed, head of the Dream Come True Foundation that grants wishes for sick children. She’s mostly there as “the girl” and straight (wo)man to the male leads’ antics.
While we’re on the subject of female characters, another example of BASEketball’s wasted potential is its use of Jenny McCarthy, or to be more precise non-use. I feel extra burned here due to false advertising. The DVD cover of BASEketball shows three central figures: Parker, Stone, and McCarthy, making it seem like McCarthy is the female lead and a major part of the movie. Nothing could be further from the truth. She shows up early on as Denslow’s wife, has a couple funny moments I’ve already mentioned with Cain, then disappears for most of the film. She returns only because — and this only counts as a spoiler if you’ve never watched a movie before — Coop ends up with Jenna at the end, and Remer wanders around forlorn, because where is his woman to kiss? Happily, Yvette runs up and randomly starts making out with him, even though the two haven’t spoken to each other the entire movie. You can say this is some brilliant satire of how women are presented as prizes for male characters in movies, or you can say it’s lazy writing. I’d say it’s the latter.
Lazy humour is a consistent problem in BASEketball. Let’s take the third-billed character, Coop and Remer’s diminutive “friend” Kenny Scolari (Dian Bachar), aka “Squeak” or “Little Bitch”. The entire joke of Squeak, we’re told, is that he’s small and ugly”, and therefore a little bitch. Ha ha. The movie keeps trying to mine laughs from this, and it might have gotten one chuckle from me the entire movie. The only genuine laugh I got from Squeak was when he gives a big heartfelt speech near the end while dressed in a giant pineapple costume. The juxtaposition of the speech and the costume was admittedly pretty funny. But then you have Squeak falling for a woman from the bar where the joke is, as Remer tells her, “she” is actually a man! Ace Ventura: Pet Detective gets a lot of flak for its transphobia nowadays, but at least that movie was funny and had a memorable lead character.
But BASEketball doesn’t just have lazy humour — it also has lazy, dated humour! Take a scene where the three male leads play a drinking game with Joey, a child under the care of the Dreams Come True Foundation and major BASEketball fan, in which they take a shot every time a fight breaks out on Jerry Springer. That’s mildly amusing, unlike a scene where Coop asks Joey what he would really want and the kid replies, “Chelsea Clinton.” Remer, who happens to be there, says, “You’d have a better shot at Bill.” I remember old commercials for BASEketball that ended with that joke, as if that would sell you on the movie, and rolling my eyes even at the time. Not defending Bill Clinton, who’s a war criminal like all modern U.S. presidents; just saying this was a lame joke then and it’s even more lame now.
Satire or not, BASEketball never makes its central premise — that BASEketball would garner a mass following — even remotely plausible. I have no great desire after watching it to play a round of BASEketball with my friends. The movie also wimps out when it comes to the “psyche-outs”, where players are allowed to try to ruin someone’s shot by attempting to psyche them out. Some of them provoke a chuckle. But a big problem is that Coop and Remer are almost never the victims of a successful psyche-out. That might at least have provided some surprises.
Probably the biggest problem with this movie is its liberal perspective on the corporatization of sports, which in the end leaves its satire weak and hollow. Coop and Remer want to create a professional sports league immune to profiteering, but under capitalism this is as much a utopian dream as any workers’ co-op. At one point Coop, owner of the NBL, swears that every player will have all kinds of good pay and benefits. But you can’t have an island of socialism in a sea of capitalism. Sooner or later, the profit motive exerts its dominance. The only real solution is to nationalize professional sports leagues under the control of their players, workers, and fans. But this solution is a book closed with seven seals to even the “edgiest” sports comedies made under capitalist control of the film industry.
