If the title wasn’t enough of a clue, subtlety doesn’t appear to be the point. Amazon, MGM, and Skydance’s “Balls Up” looks built as a broad, boozy, overclocked studio comedy, with Mark Wahlberg and Paul Walter Hauser playing a pair of marketing executives whose bright idea—a full-coverage condom sponsorship tied to the World Cup—turns into an international mess once their celebration in Brazil goes off the rails. From there, the movie sends them running from furious fans, criminals, and corrupt officials while they try to salvage both their jobs and their skins.
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That setup alone tells you exactly what lane Peter Farrelly is driving in here. This isn’t prestige Farrelly or sentimental Farrelly. It’s the filmmaker returning to a louder, dumber, more aggressively high-concept kind of comedy, which makes Wahlberg and Hauser a pretty natural pairing. Wahlberg can do exasperated meathead panic in his sleep, and Hauser’s gift for wounded oddball energy has gotten sharp enough that putting him in a movie this shameless could either go very right or completely off the hinges. Either way, it probably won’t be timid.
The supporting cast gives it a little more juice, too. Along with Wahlberg and Hauser, the film stars Benjamin Bratt, Eva De Dominici, Daniela Melchior, Molly Shannon, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Eric André, which is the kind of lineup that suggests the movie knows chaos is part of the sales pitch. Farrelly directs from a script by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the writing duo behind the “Deadpool” movies and “Zombieland,” so the promise here is less elegant comic construction than a willingness to keep pushing a bad idea until it becomes its own engine.
That’s probably the real question hanging over “Balls Up.” Can it turn a one-joke premise and a lot of testosterone into something genuinely funny instead of just frantic? Farrelly has done this before, and Amazon MGM clearly thinks there’s still some audience appetite for the kind of mid-budget, star-driven comedy studios used to crank out without overthinking it. Even on premise alone, “Balls Up” at least sounds like it remembers that a comedy can still be vulgar, physical, and a little idiotic without apologizing for itself first.
“Balls Up” premieres April 15 on Prime Video. Watch the Red-Band trailer below.
