Life has its embarrassments. For “Airplane!” co-writer and co-director David Zucker, one of them may turn out to be “BASEketball,” a movie whose title looks misspelled and whose ideas seem miscarried.
Despite some good, gross, funny scenes and moments — and a pair of impressive debut star turns in the lead parts of slackers-turned-sports idols by “South Park’s” Trey Parker and Matt Stone — “BASEketball” is a real mind-boggler. How can you respond to a picture that asks us to imagine that America’s next great spectator sports craze will be a variation on “Horse,” played mostly by out-of-shape guys who can’t run and spend much of the game playing gross practical jokes and spewing venomous insults at each other?
A sports satire of deliberate and awesome silliness, “BASEketball” not only marks Zucker’s return to directing eight years after “The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear,” but also the big-feature acting debuts of Parker and Stone, co-creators of the ultra-edgy TV cartoon series “South Park.” And it also introduces the newly formed comedy team of Bob Costas and Al Michaels playing deviate sportscasters, and Reggie Jackson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in cameos as themselves.
Burying them all is possibly the single loopiest movie premise of the past few months. “BASEketball’s” inspiration is a version of the driveway basketball-shooting contest “Horse,” combined with baseball scoring rules. In the game, shots from various parts of the court are graded as singles, doubles, triples or homers — and missed shots can be tipped in by defenders. (Regular defense is not allowed, but opponents can try to disrupt shots by “psych-outs”: violent horseplay or trash-talking.)
Zucker and his pals invented this game over a decade ago, actually forming “baseketball” leagues and staging championship games. It must have been a great chapter in their lives. And they may have been too blinded by nostalgia to realize it wouldn’t necessarily make a good movie — at least with this script.
In the movie, baseketball is invented by two L.A. layabouts: Joe “Coop” Cooper (Parker) and Doug Remer (Stone), guys a few cuts above “Dumb and Dumber.” Joined by another pal, pint-size Squeak Scolari (Dian Bachar), Coop and Remer keep playing the game in their L.A. driveway until they begin drawing huge crowds and the attention of eccentric billionaire Ted Denslow (Ernest Borgnine), who bankrolls a new pro baseketball sports league.
Soon, a small war develops between Coop’s team, the lovable runner-up Milwaukee Beers, and the bruising champ Dallas Felons. And between the guys and a nefarious tycoon, Baxter Cain (Robert Vaughn), who wants to cheat them and make it a league of his own, and who sees his chance when Denslow expires at a game after choking on a foot-long hot dog. In addition to the heavy male bonding, there are also two very superficial romantic interests: “Baywatch’s” Yasmine Bleeth as the beauteous and idealistic head of a local charitable institution for unfortunate children, the Dream Come True Foundation, and rubber-faced Playmate Jenny McCarthy as Denslow’s daffy, stacked widow.
It’s Zucker’s notion that baseketball can become the nation’s top spectator sport — despite the fact that it’s obviously more fun to play than watch — because fans are fed up with players, managers, owners and their antics, trades and rebuilding programs. (Baseketball teams forbid player trades and franchise shifts.)
Fans may be fed up, but that doesn’t make baseketball, as a game or a movie, any more fun to watch.
When the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team split up as co-directors after 1986’s “Ruthless People,” it was David Zucker’s movies (The “Naked Gun” series) that seemed funnier. But his old cohorts, Jim Abrahams and younger brother Jerry Zucker, made better-looking movies. That pattern holds true here: “BASEketball” is a movie with some laughs but few good shots. And, though Zucker’s gross-out gags are likably raunchy and unbuttoned, they pale next to the ones in the current big-grosser “There’s Something About Mary.”
The stars, blond-dyed Parker and frizzy-haired Stone, are quite good. They work together with the loose camaraderie and effortless timing of a born comedy team — even if the jokes mostly aren’t theirs and their characters are amiably goofy, slightly smarter versions of the teams in “Dumb and Dumber” or “Wayne’s World.” Playing overgrown goof-offs who begin every other sentence with “Dude,” mixing mean-spirited humor with twisted romanticism, they still manage to hold the screen. Their buddy Bachar, at times, is even better: a natural scene-stealer.
But it all comes to naught. Even Zucker’s trademark movie and sports parodies — the shock moments when Costas talks about his nipples, or Robert Stack swears a blue streak — don’t work as well as similar scenes did 20 years ago. I think the only way to really make a good movie out of “BASEketball” would have been to keep the whole thing small: to satirize sports and publicity while keeping baseketball itself just as a driveway game that catches on locally, with the characters as L.A. types a bit more like Zucker and his real-life friends. That would have been a more naturalistic comedy — and more dramatic and real — than the older Zucker brother has ever directed. But it probably would have been better than this one.
”BASEKETBALL”
(star) 1/2
Directed by David Zucker; written by Zucker, Robert LoCash, Lewis Friedman, Jeff Wright; photographed by Steve Mason; edited by Jeffrey Reiner; production designed by Steven Jordan; music by James Ira Newborn; produced by Zucker, LoCash, Gil Netter. A Universal Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:38. MPAA rating: R (language, sensuality, violence).
THE CAST
Joe Cooper ………… Trey Parker
Doug Remer ………… Matt Stone
Squeak Scolari …….. Dian Bachar
Jenna Reed ………… Yasmine Bleeth
Yvette Denslow …….. Jenny McCarthy
Ted Denslow ……….. Ernest Borgnine
Baxter Cain ……….. Robert Vaughn
