Review: LADYBALLERS
Coach Rob: This divorce. I think it is really starting to affect my daughter.
Gwen Wilde (sarcastically): Seriously? Of course your divorce is affecting your daughter: 70% of all people in prison come from broken families; she’s twice as likely to do drugs; twice as likely to drop out of school; four times is likely to have trouble fitting in; three times as likely to end up in therapy; twice as likely to commit suicide; 50% more likely to have health problems.
Gwen Wilde (Rolling her eyes): Do people not even do a freaking Google search before you decide to blow up the planet your kids live on?
LADYBALLERS (2023) is a sports drama and political satire starring, written and directed by Jeremy Boreing. It is noteworthy as being one the few conservative, countercultural films made in the year, outside of the crushingly conformist establishment media institutions, hence opposed, condemned, libeled and ignored by them, and subjected to an Orwellian Two-Minute Hate session.
As sign of this hysteria may be seen on the Rotten Tomatoes website (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lady_ballers) where, as of the time of this writing, the audience score from 5000 comments stands at 91% and the critic score from seven — yes, a whopping total of seven reviews from all professional film review outlets were penned — stands at 43%.
The hysteria is misplaced. LADYBALLERS is a droll comedy, not remarkably funny nor yet remarkably unfunny, not original nor yet unoriginal, but workmanlike, hence a pleasant enough way to beguile an hour and fifty minutes. The film sets out to do what it means to do, and earns many a chuckle and chortle, but no belly-laughs.
One or two of the comedic bits fall flat, or fail to cohere with the rest of the theme, or were too crude and lowbrow for my particular G-rated Victorian tastes, but in general the goodnatured charm and humor is maintained.
One particular bit I thought funny enough to pause and rewatch was the panning shot of the lawnsigns outside the house of gentle hippy do-gooder Kris, played by Matt Walsh in a brilliantly understated deadpan performance.
Since the film was hyped for its countercultural message, it may come as a surprise to learn that the storyline and theme is not about that.
The film traces the character arc of a once-great coach seeking to recapture his glory days by bringing his retired high school basket ball team out of retirement, and entering them as women in women sporting events, after the coach’s eight-year old daughter explains the nuances of modern critical gender theory to him and them, which she learned in elementary school. But this merely the backdrop of a morality play about the lure of ambition and the priority of family life.
The film begins as a flashback in the glory days with a send-up of typical sports dramas, where the loosing team rallies itself despite long odds thanks to the stirring locker room speech of the hard-bitten coach, complete with profound catch-phrase. The schtick is lampshaded, since the coach, in dialog, says that teams do not rally merely because of stirring locker room speeches as happens in sports dramas. Of course they do, and go on to win the championship.
Cut to the present, where Coach Rob (Jeremy Borering) is divorced, unsuccessful, and miserable. Fired, finding himself unemployed, he goes into a bar looking for work, only to discover it is a transvestite bar. One of the waiters in drag is the point guard from his old team Alex (Alex Cruise), now softened into approaching middle age. By mishap, they discover that the local track and field events are open to transvestites, under the theory that it would be discrimination to forbid men in wigs to compete against women.
Of course, the man smokes the female athletes in a comical montage at every event, including defeating swimmer Riley Gaines (played by Riley Gaines). This brings him to the attention of the sexy, unscrupulous, and sadistic newswoman Gwen Wilde (Billie Rae Brandt), who seduces Coach Rob, and convinces him to continue the fraud as a way of achieving fame and fortune for them both.
Comedy ensues as we see the ex-highschool athletes now as used car salesman, backwoods mountain hermit, or millionaire, convinced to don wigs and pink jumpers and soundly defeat their female opponents, who are not allowed, for reasons of political correctness, to complain about the obvious unfairness of facing men. The team is reluctant at first, but then grow enthused as they are larded with praise and adulation, victories and sponsorships.
In one particularly funny bit, two television news anchors (Brett Cooper and Michael Knowles) accidently let slip that the men are male, the live feed is immediately cut, and when they are next seen, having survived re-education struggle sessions, both are now dressed in ethnic costumes of remote non-white ancestors, and have changed to non-white names.
The film rises above mere satire by showing Coach Rob growing increasingly vexed with himself as his ex-wife, whom he still loves, condemns the fraud. Tensions increase within the team, due to their own awareness of their own dishonesty, not to mention injuring women during rough play.
However, when Coach Rob desires to quit, sexy but sadistic newswoman Gwen conspires to assassinate him, and, when that fails, to gather another transvestite team of taller, younger, and stronger black men called the Hawkettes, to soundly defeat them.
Rather than face certain defeat, at halftime the Ladyballers substitute a team of eight-year old schoolgirls who “identify” as grown-ups, including Coach Rob’s daughter.
The opposing team are charmed and delighted by the schoolgirl waifs, and so, with the approval of the crowd and sportscasters, the Hawkettes politely lift the little ones high enough to dunk baskets. The schoolgirls still loose by hundreds of points, however, but the crowd is no longer enamored with the pretense of critical gender theory.
Lesson learned, the team disbands, Coach Rob returns to his ex-wife, and Matt Walsh, in a shtick lifted from Leonard Nimoy’s appearance on THE SIMPSONS, declares his work to have been accomplished.
One of the inside jokes of the film is that the cast is all conservative pundits and social media personalities. The film is not as thickly peppered with cameo appearances as in AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS (1956), but then again, the number of conservative pundits cannot match the number of film stars from mid-50’s Hollywood. (Film stars, after all, are glorified for selling glamor, whereas pundits are censored and suppressed for telling truth.)
I was startled to see, during the closing credits, a cameo attributed to Jordan Peterson, but this was an additional joke, since his only cameo is immediately after, in an after-credits scene, yawning and nodding as one of the athletes takes the psychoanalytic coach, having grown befuddled about his identity during the film.
The acting is surprisingly good for a cast of non-actors, aided by the fact that everyone is basically playing himself.
This is particularly true for Flower Child Matt Walsh, playing Kris Dilby, because he here drops the false persona as a sour-faced conservative he uses on Daily Wire, and lets his true inner rainbow-and-sunshine self emerge like a beautiful butterfly.
One of the more foolish and absurd accusations leveled against the film during the Two-Minute Hate session orchestrated by the establishment, was that the actors playing the ballplayers could not, in real life, defeat a female basketball team, because they are too short. The irony here is that the team was played by the Daily Wire sportscaster team from their podcast CRAIN & COMPANY, three men who were championship basketballers back in the day, and are all well over six feet tall.
Indeed, the promotional material for the film mentions that this originally had been meant to be a documentary, merely a filming retired and out-of-practice male basketballers against a current female pro team and seeing the results, but no women’s sports league would actually allow it. In reality, the female leagues only pretend to allow men to compete against women, just as the men only pretend to be women, so the few and outrageous times it happens — as with Riley Gaines was defeated by Lia Thomas nee William Thomas — are rare enough to make national news.
Another reviewer, equally vitriolic, accused Daily Wire of “not understanding weight classes” since it is patently obvious that a heavyweight cannot wrestle a featherweight. The irony of this is apparently lost on the vitriolic reviewer. One wonders what he might say if the heavyweight “identified” as a featherweight, and so pretend to be in the weight class as easily as a male pretends to be female. Will the reviewer say that an athlete’s weight is an identifiable, measurable scientific fact, but that an athlete’s sex is not?
The production values are modest, as would be any story set in modern day suburbia, where no backlot sets are required. The filmwork and camerawork are unobtrusive, roughly at the level of a made-for-television movie, or, in this case, made-for-streaming.
When compared to slickly-produced Hollywood comedy products, the work product here seems modest, with the exception that the comedy here is actually funny, whereas slickly-produced Hollywood comedy products are not. When compared with other productions of the Daily Wire, however, it is rather ambitious, boldly non-conformist, and on that level, a success.
In an earlier era, this modesty funny and moderately well made film would have been a solid but unexceptional comedy. In the current era, real life is more satirical than make-believe, and so a film which advertises itself as “the most triggering comedy of the year” literally triggers the leftwing commentary commissars, who literally overreact with the pretend hysteria of post-traumatic stress disorder, and hence are literally triggered moreso than by any other comedy this year.
Sadly, the freakish cult beliefs of the Leftwing audience will anathematize any laughter or droll wisdom the film might otherwise impart to them. They have been ordered to hate it, sight unseen. Likewise, conservative audiences will tend to forgive the film’s flaws out of rightwing loyalty, except that conservatives also are loyal to scrupulous honesty, and so will be harsh on the poor film as a sacrifice to the honor of reviewer integrity. The matter is made unduly difficult and silly by the difficult and silly times in which we live. One cannot even tell a good-natured joke about the absurdity of men in drag competing against women athletes without provoking fake outrage and fake controversy.
The film is not controversial. Neither is it a work of comedic genius, equal to a Marx Brothers film. Nor is it merely a flat political satire like so many flat political satires we saw from the Left in the 1960s. It rises at times to sober insight, so is deeper than one might expect.
It is not great, but not bad, and well worth the time and effort of any fan of sanity to support, if for no other reason than to oppose the establishment chattergoons seeking to libel and malign it.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
