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No consensus yet.
All Critics (22) | Top Critics (3) | Fresh (9) | Rotten (13) | DVD (6)
A full-on local crowd-pleaser, "Blackball" takes the genteel sport of, uh, lawn bowling and comes up with a shameless slice of Brit flag-waving comedy.
It's messy, but the real problem is: it's not funny.
A hackneyed portrait of zany British eccentrics whose limited appeal will presumably sink like a stone in the English Channel ...
The laughs here are way off-target. This Brit-flop won't be bowling anyone over.
Tim Firth's script is functional on a sitcom level at best, and Mel Smith's direction differs from the usual hack job only in being a bit worse (especially in the frequent montages set to rock songs).
It just winds up as another filmmaking exercise where it's thought that the story is there, but in reality, it got drunk at the corner bar and puked all over the characters.
Shares very little in common with the anarchic humor of the magazine, live shows, records or movies that made the Lampoon name so venerated in the first place.
Blackball is a cinematic dirty bomb, a mediocre "comedy" that offers as many laughs as a dentist's drill.
Only occasionally does Blackball rise to the level of something that would stop you from flipping channels on TV.
...another variation on the "snobs versus slobs" formula codified by Caddyshack
a humorless bit of nonsense
Blackball isn't going to single-handedly save British cinema, but it's a likeable comedy all the same, even for those wouldn't know a good in-swinger if it came curving towards them at a frightening pace.
Reasonably entertaining, and though I'm not sure that it's exactly how it happened it's all good fun.
Super Reviewer
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