Powerful

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

The film is a spoof of sports films. It centers on inter-mural flag football teams. It gives us the initial game and then goes to five years later as they get back the team. The main character is Caleb (Jake Lacy). he is engaged to a woman he doesn't love and then meets the love of his life, the twin sister of a despicable person on the other team. The film is filled with the inane and cliches and near the midpoint, the plot is explained on the board in generic sports film terms.The humor is basically low brow and crude, but not bottom feeders in this regard. There are no f-bombs, sex, or nudity...except for maybe a brief locker room backside scene. The sports slogans get mixed and confused as I question if "Rocky III" may have been better than "Rocky." Kate McKinnon was classic as the cringe worthy rich fiancee.

Caleb played by Jake Lacy from the final season of The Office television series is a senior preparing to graduate from college. He is in his fifth year and has already been in college for too long. But he doesn't quite want to leave yet. He sees the "concrete wall" of commitment laid out in front of him and gets scared. He runs away from this iron cage of commitment and responsibility by forming an intramural football team as an escape. The group that he forms can best be summed up by the advice they give each other on how to get with freshman girls in college. You have to remember:, "A little knock knock, welcome to class…tap that ass". The jokes throughout the movie are very intelligent and many are easily missed. But the movie is clearly geared towards men. There is one quip about Uday Hussein being a Quaker that was particularly heinous. During a team meeting a member of the team asks, "What's more dangerous, a man with no fear or a man with nothing to lose?". Caleb turns the question on its head with, "What about a man who's not afraid of losing?". "Balls Out" is the rare comedy that is both funny and self-aware. The film is chock full of hilarious moments like during another team meeting when the adopted mentor of the team teaches, "There is a classic structure to all underdog sports movies. Rocky, Hosiers, Air Buds 1,2, 3 and 5". One teammate interrupts, "What about Air Bud 4?". "A dog playing baseball? Are you insane?".Watch this movie if looking for a few laughs. It is sure to deliver. As the stoner commentator narrates at the end of the film, "In my nine and a half years of college, I thought I'd seen it all. I witnessed a 2,000 cup game of beer pong that claimed the lives of seven bros. I've seen Frisbee so ultimate, it threatened the supremacy of God himself. I've even seen my colleague Dan here swallow two keys of pure Bolivian heroin to make good on a series of increasingly misguided cockfighting bets. But I never thought I'd witness such an amazing game of intramural football".

The theatrical poster for Balls Out (also known as Intramural and another film that can't maintain consistency of what it should be called on a variety of different film websites) reminds me of the DVD covers of a direct-to-DVD National Lampoon film or a throwaway sex comedy one can find by lazily searching Netflix's streaming selection. Its boisterous display of the backside of a cheerleader in uniform, complete with a football reading the film's title is perplexing because it seems that MGM and Orion Pictures is marketing a totally different film here. After seeing the festival circuit success of a film like They Came Together, a film that was hellbent on calling out the clichés of romantic comedies, did these two immensely successful studios really think a film about parodying sports clichés couldn't succeed? It's no real bother because the more under-the-radar Balls Out stays, the better. This is one of the many desperately unfunny comedies I've seen this year, almost down there with Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser and Mortdecai in the way these films seem to cloyingly pine for laughs by throwing their main character into any circumstance so long as it's allegedly funny. Balls Out, a film centered around a gaggle of misfit football players in college whom reunite their ragtag, intramural football team years after an injured teammate caused them to disband, is a film that sets itself up to fail right from the get-go. It's a film that tries to emphasize the stupidity, incredulity, and sheer brainlessness of a plethora of underdog sports films, but instead of going a separate way and rising above the clichés, Balls Out finds it funny to simply play by them in a loud and obvious manner. By the end, I had one question for director Andrew Disney and writer Bradley Jackson - what did you accomplish with this particular film? You didn't prove yourself better than the sports films you were lampooning, you just dumbed your film down to their level by positioning this film as the answer to all the clichés and predictabilities of a genre.Where They Came Together had the chemistry of Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler at its core, constantly emphasizing their quick-witted nature and their plethora of zingers, Balls Out pathetically orchestrates one tired situation after another that involves the group of collegians yelling, screaming, and slamming one another to the ground in an entirely witless fashion. Laughing at the fact these imbeciles take intramural sports so seriously grows grating, especially when the memories of gym class from school-years gone past begin to surface, where all the torment and humiliation came into play.At its core, however, Balls Out is simply not funny. Like its characters, it tries so hard to make us laugh by persistently nudging us, the audience, positioning itself to be wiser and more humorous than the film it's parodying, when it finds a way to be much lower than those films simply because it fails at its ultimate goal of being a successful comedy. This is also the case of a film that maybe could've made a successful two to three minute skit on Saturday Night Live (apparently this film stars members of comedy groups like that, Derrick Comedy, BriTANicK, and Good Neighbor, although I presume a lot of their talent got lost in translation); it certainly makes a nearly insufferable one-hundred minutes.Starring: Jake Lacy, Beck Bennett, Jay Pharoah, Nikki Reed, and Kate McKinnon. Directed by: Andrew Disney.

Ignore the title and poster art for Balls Out. It's not a National Lampoon presents type of "movie". Once you've decided not to judge a movie by it's poster, sit back and enjoy a surprisingly witty, slapstick, sports movie that has an unbelievable cast. Balls Out has several SNL cast members (Jay Pharoh, Beck Bennett,Kate McKinnon) and some Youtube/Comedy Troop stars that fill out the roles. The biggest names are Jake Lacy (Obvious Child) and Nikki Reed (Twilight series) who are the focal point of the movie. What makes Balls Out different is it's supporting cast. It's the kind of film where the supporting cast steals the show and you end up liking them a lot more than the aforementioned actors. Without a doubt, Beck Bennett is worth seeing this movie alone. He's like Stan Gable from Revenge of the Nerds turned up to 11. Kate McKinnon has very few scenes, but she steals every single one of them. In a few years, people will look back at this movie and wonder how in the hell they got all of these stars in one movie.There are some great scenes and hilarious moments that come from out of nowhere. The dick and fart jokes are few but they land; a refreshing style of comedy from an indie film. My only beef with "Balls Out" is Jake Lacy and Nikki Reed. They're pretty to look at and void of charisma. Jake may have played his role a little too straight in a movie of outrageous characters. Other than that, this movie is a MUST SEE. You can sound cool and say you this before "fill in the blank actor/actress" got super famous. Stop reading and watch it already!!!!!!