Benchwarmers is another Bad News Bears/Mighty Ducks-style "ragtag sports team" stories, utilizing cardboard stock "jock" and "nerd" characters for its main conflict, a juvenile understanding of women as its social message, and repetitive, clichéd setups and payoffs for its emotional highs and lows. Yet all of this serves a surprisingly sweet and inclusive underdog movie along the lines of Heavyweights. It's this kind of genre film that ultimately makes Hollywood great. Critics may laud the classics, but it's movies like The Benchwarmers that have really defined Hollywood forever. In spite of all the bathroom humor, the movie itself is charmingly quaint, like an old forgotten baseball movie from the 40s. The storyline concerns Rob Schneider, David Spade, and Jon Heder forming an all-star "nerd" baseball team, with the financial backing of super-rich nerd Jon Lovitz (who drives the original KITT … which comes off funnier than you'd expect). Heder blurts semi-expletives and non-sequitirs ("Poop!") pretty much as another variant on Napoleon Dynamite, but it's still pretty funny. Spade sports a terrible pageboy haircut and plays up his "lovable loser" schtick, while Schneider tries to fill the "Adam Sandler" role: former nerd, now cool, loyal to his friends, and dorkily smooth with the ladies. These three try to reclaim their entitlement to athletic participation as a way of purging memories of "being picked on by the jocks," etc. This, of course, results in the cathartic, semi-sarcastic "Can't we all just get along?" conclusion. Obviously, it's no Seven Samurai. It's obsessed with depantsing, titty-twisters, farting in people's faces, and people getting hit with flying baseball bats and/or balls. It's at least 20 minutes too long, drags in spots, and makes no attempt to rise above the sewer. Yet it always circles back to the heart, making it a rare scatological exercise that has … am I crazy? … some real social value! Special props for getting Reggie Jackson involved and having him destroy mailboxes with a baseball bat – no matter which way you slice that, it's fuckin' pleasing. And yes, he apologizes to an old lady afterward.
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