The Bad News Bears taught us the joy of playing beyond just victory.  Revenge of the Nerds showed us that the geeks will inherit the Earth.  The Benchwarmers has kids playing baseball and oppressed nerds, but its most salient theme is making children hanker for Pepsi products.  It’s not in the same product-placement league as that two-hour commercial I, Robot, but then I can’t think of a single other film that is.

Gus (Rob Schneider) is a middle-aged guy with his own landscaping company and some exceedingly strange friends.  Richie (David Spade) and Clark (John Heder, aka Napoleon Dynamite) are still struggling to break out of adolescence at about age 40, or at least find a female willing to talk to them.  The three form their own baseball team (complete with a pitcher, catcher, and outfielder only, though only Gus can really play) in order to teach the local bratty baseball team a lesson.  A nerd by nature and proud of it, Mel (Jon Lovitz) decides to finance the three former benchwarmers to play other grade-school teams known to make fun of the socially challenged, especially the one coached by Jerry (Craig Kilborn), a long-time bully.

There are titty twisters, projectile vomiting, face-farts, and surprisingly only one instance of someone getting hit in the testicles.  Clark eats boogers and a squashed beetle, and flings his bat while at the plate to cause varying forms of supposedly hilarious damage.  I thought it might just be me, but even the younger kids in the audience didn’t find much to laugh out loud about, as so many of the jokes seemed to lack the energy or the wit that would make them funny.  The gay jokes seem, if the reader will forgive the pun, completely out of left field.

Heder and Lovitz look like the only ones having any fun with a mediocre script.  As what is all but a reprisal of his role in Napoleon Dynamite, Heder is even more socially inept, though we unfortunately don’t get to see him dance.  We may not get to see as much of Mel, but the way he relishes his nerd heritage is far more convincing (and fun) than most of the other acts.  Life-sized Star Wars models adorn his house and he proudly drives K.I.T.T., the car from Knight Rider.

It’s strange but not unheard of that so many big names in comedy (including Adam Sandler, a producer on the project) would generate something as bland as all that (see Mars Attacks), but I get the feeling that The Benchwarmers is caught between targeting a younger audience and using some rather raunchy humor for that particular demographic.  There’s kind of a theme about bullying, and kind of a desire to just tell a funny story, but both attempts seem half-hearted and we’re left wishing the filmmakers had decided to make a better kid’s movie or an unabashed comedy.  Children may chuckle a little, but more likely than that they’ll be asking for Pizza Hut, Pepsi, and Playstation 2 afterwards.

Film Rating: ê1/2 (out of 4)