Balls Up

Any stimulation you feel won’t be of the intellectual variety while watching Balls Up, a low-brow affair that gives moviegoers the shaft.

Agonizingly stretching its one-joke premise, this uninspired buddy comedy from director Peter Farrelly (Green Book) is about two dimwits ready to revolutionize the condom industry, with most of the jokes appropriately directed below the belt.

Think of all the possibilities for double entendres, naughty euphemisms, and gross-out sight gags. The filmmakers did, and it turns out there aren’t enough to carry a raunchy feature that showcases some scattered laughs but climaxes too quickly.

For Brad (Mark Wahlberg) and Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser), prophylactics are serious business. They work at a New York company where Elijah’s innovation offers a twist on traditional condom design — although it’s not worth detailing the specifics.

However, Elijah’s social awkwardness makes him the wrong person to present the idea, which is where Brad’s outgoing nature comes in handy.

They unveil the product in the months leading up to the soccer World Cup, with the, um, goal of becoming the tournament’s official birth-control sponsor. That sends the duo to the host country, Brazil, where they party with a top official (Benjamin Bratt) who loves the idea and gifts them prime seats to the championship game.

That’s where an inebriated Elijah has a run-in with a sausage mascot — again, we’ll skip the particulars — causing an incident that turns the entire soccer-crazed country against the American pitchmen.

They become desperate to escape, only to encounter an eccentric narcotics kingpin (Sacha Baron Cohen), hungry alligators, hard-core environmental activists, and Amazon fish with an unusual appetite.

Perhaps the film was more fun to make than it is to watch. Yet it’s a pale imitation of the type of comedies Farrelly used to make with his brother, Bobby, going back more than 30 years.

The silly and sophomoric screenplay by Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese (Deadpool) is mostly innocuous, overloaded with quirks, cringey gaffes, and public humiliations.

There’s no underlying satirical edge or meaningful attempt to be subversive, despite poking fun at global soccer fanaticism. Instead, the jokes feel progressively more labored, only slightly redeemed by a late twist.

Just like its two bumbling misfits, Balls Up is considerably more obnoxious than endearing. It’s the cinematic equivalent of being kicked in the crotch.

Rated R, 104 minutes.