Balls Up (dir. Peter Farrelly)

by Jack Martin | Apr 16, 2026

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 107 mins

UK Distributor: Prime Video

UK Release Date: 15 April 2026

WHO’S IN BALLS UP?

Mark Wahlberg, Paul Walter Hauser, Molly Shannon, Benjamin Bratt, Daniela Melchior, Eric André, Sacha Baron Cohen, Eva De Dominici, Chelsey Crisp

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Peter Farrelly (director), Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (writers, producers), David Ellison, Dan Goldberg, Don Granger and Andrew Muscato (producers), Dave Palmer (composer), John Brawley (cinematographer), Sam Seig (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A pair of marketing executives (Wahlberg and Hauser) find themselves running for their lives in Brazil…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON BALLS UP?

Dick jokes. That’s all this movie is for one-hundred godforsaken minutes: dick jokes, upon dick jokes, upon dick jokes. The very premise revolves around dicks and balls. Most of the dialogue is people talking crudely about men’s privates. Even the title, Balls Up, pretty much speaks for itself. It is one overlong and painfully unfunny dick joke that even Ray William Johnson would say is way too much.

I feel like a deeply disappointed school headmaster right now, just from looking at the people who brought this monstrosity to life. Now, I expect this kind of vulgarity from director Peter Farrelly, who with his brother Bobby became synonymous in the 90s and early 2000s with crude gross-out comedies such as Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, Shallow Hal and others. But you, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick? You guys wrote Deadpool and Zombieland, you’re both so much better than this. And you, Academy Award-nominee Mark Wahlberg? You may be no stranger to dumb comedies, but is partaking in scenes of you deep-throating an inflated phallic condom filled with cocaine and having your co-star Paul Walter Hauser bite a tiny CGI fish out of your urethra really, honestly worth it? Right, gentlemen, wrists out (in this scenario, I’m one of those headmasters who still dishes out corporal punishment).

But seriously, this movie is awful. Not a single laugh to be had from filmmakers, actors and the like who should all know better than to make something so lifeless, not to mention so devoid of charm and enjoyment.

If you must know, the film follows Brad (Wahlberg) and Elijah (Hauser), two marketing executives for a condom manufacturing company who come up with a bold new design that covers the testicles as well as the penis. “Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?”, several characters ask at different intervals. The answer, at least to anyone with a brain, is because it’s a stupid idea and looks even stupider when put into practise. But in this universe where everyone is an idiot, Brad and Elijah manage to successfully pitch it as the official condom of the upcoming World Cup in Brazil, where they’re eventually invited to witness the feverishly anticipated final between the Brazilian and Argentinian football teams.

However, a drunken match-costing mishap involving the aggressively phallic-shaped mascot lands the both of them on top of everyone’s kill list, forcing them on a madcap journey across the country and towards safety, encountering along the way some murderous environmentalists, a coked-up alligator, and Sacha Baron Cohen as a long-haired cartel leader who’s always one mispronounced word away from becoming the Brazilian equivalent of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

I almost feel bad putting a Blake Edwards movie in the same sentence as a description of Balls Up, because Edwards may not have gotten everything right in his own career but even at his weakest, he proved to be a far stronger comedic filmmaker than a solo Peter Farrelly has become. The director is in full “point the camera there and hope for the best” mode here, making little or no attempt to make anything in Reese and Wernick’s surprisingly lethargic script sound even the slightest bit funny, with sight gags that make little sense or are just there for shock value and nothing else. His actors are left to simply mug their way through the brain-dead material, which to their credit they remain firmly committed to, even if some of them are stripped of any and all dignity in scenes where the likes of Benjamin Bratt smoke crack and strip butt-naked before swinging across a night club like Tarzan.

It’s a dead-zone of comedy, made all the more desolate by Farrelly’s complete lack of directorial restraint, and a script that, once again, goes for broke with its one joke and refuses to stop, even when it’s clear that the joke wasn’t all that funny in the first place. Moreover, the concept of an entire country setting out to kill these two dunderheaded protagonists is barely even touched upon, as the film spends most of its time in a handful of secluded locations such as Cohen’s luxurious compound and the environmentalists’ rainforest campsite, presumably because whatever budget they had couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be spent on hundreds of extras chasing after them through the streets of wherever is doubling for Brazil. It makes the film look surprisingly cheap, particularly with some bad green-screen and CGI animals cluttering up a tension-free second-half, where barely anything happens until an unearned climax that even A Goofy Movie pulled off in far better ways.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with a raunchy comedy every now and then, especially one that relies so heavily on crude body humour. But there has to be so much more than just endless dick jokes: you need variety, whether it’s different kinds of gags or characters you don’t mind seeing all the slapstick happen to. Balls Up doesn’t have any of that, instead sticking to one drawn-out joke and getting fewer and fewer laughs every time, under lifeless direction that refuses to appeal towards anyone with more than one braincell.

It’s lowest-common-denominator all the way, and it’s just utterly miserable to even talk about, let alone actually watch.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Balls Up couldn’t be a more appropriate title, for not only is it a truly awful comedy that represents the worst of director Peter Farrelly’s comedic potential, but thanks to a laugh-free script that relies so heavily on a single unfunny dick joke all throughout, it’s also a genuine drag that nobody should be forced to sit through.