The Benchwarmers
Happy Madison's 2006 comedy about three grown-up nerds, Rob Schneider, David Spade and Jon Heder, who take on every Little League team in the state for the kids who never got picked. Critics hated it, it opened at #2 anyway, and it has since picked up a cult following.
The Benchwarmers came out of Adam Sandler's Happy Madison. Sandler produced it with Jack Giarraputo, Allen Covert and Nick Swardson wrote it, and Dennis Dugan directed. The heroes are three adult nerds who never got to play baseball as kids: Gus (Rob Schneider), a groundskeeper and the only one who can actually play; Richie (David Spade), a video-store clerk; and Clark (Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder), a paperboy. Artie Lange was originally cast as Clark, Spade said later. After the three chase a bullying Little League team off a field and then beat them, a nerd billionaire (Jon Lovitz) sets up a statewide tournament with a new stadium as the prize, and the Benchwarmers become heroes to nerds and unathletic kids everywhere.
The jokes go right where you'd expect a Happy Madison baseball movie to go: Swardson as Richie's brother, who hasn't left the house in months, a rival coach (Craig Kilborn) who bullied Richie and Clark when they were kids, a grown-man ringer with a birth certificate written in crayon, and a big finale that ends with everyone at Pizza Hut. Lovitz's character has a robot butler, James Earl Jones voices a Darth Vader gate system at his mansion, and Reggie Jackson shows up as himself to help train the three. The plot also turns on a twist, the revelation that Gus was a bully himself as a boy, and on his apology to the kid he picked on.
The film opened on April 7, 2006, and took in $19.6 million its first weekend, second only to Ice Age: The Meltdown. For years it had the biggest opening ever for a baseball movie, until 42 passed it in 2013. Critics were brutal. Rotten Tomatoes' consensus called it "a gross-out comedy that is more sophomoric than funny," and Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called it "the sort of trash that Hollywood does really well." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly liked it, describing it as a mix of The Bad News Bears and a Three Stooges episode that "parades its dumbness with such zip that it almost passes for clever." It ended at about $65 million worldwide and has since gained a cult following. A direct-to-DVD sequel, Benchwarmers 2: Breaking Balls, brought Lovitz back in 2019.
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