By Justin Kroll
For The State News
It's very common in movies today that we see actors simply playing themselves rather than portraying characters on screen.
Actors such as Tom Cruise and Will Smith rarely take on a character that doesn't reflect a little bit of their own personalities and there's nothing wrong with that. Audiences enjoy these actors and keep coming back to see their performances.
But some actors who play the same type of character over and over again become more repetitive and irritating than entertaining.
Rob Schneider, David Spade and Jon Heder have gotten to that point in their careers, and the performances they give in their new movie, "The Benchwarmers," is nothing different from previous performances.
In the movie, Schneider, Spade and Heder play Gus, Richie and Clark — three guys who were picked on throughout school because they were considered nerds and unable to do certain activities like play sports or hang out with girls.
As adults they still deal with the same type of problems — they all work dead-end jobs, don't have a lot of friends besides each other and have their fair share of girl problems (according to Clark, he has never even spoken to a female).
After witnessing a kid getting picked on by a little league baseball team, they feel it is their responsibility to stick up for him, so they confront the team and challenge them to a game of baseball.
The three guys destroy the team and feel they have accomplished something for all nerds across world.
After the game, they are approached by Mel (Jon Lovitz), a former nerd who became a billionaire after high school, with a proposal. His son is constantly picked on and Mel wants these guys to start a tournament in which they would play several little league baseball teams and prove to all the bullies and jocks that they can no longer pick on the little guy.
This is where the problems arise. Does it make any sense that these guys challenge kids who are younger and smaller than them to a game of baseball? Would it not make more sense to challenge guys who picked on them as kids to prove their point? Doesn't it contradict their point when they play younger children?
They accept his offer, the games begin and the film stops being funny. The rest of the film is just a series of run-on jokes that never change.
For example, Clark throwing his bat into the crowd whenever he bats, or Richie saying the same style of sarcastic joke we are used to seeing from a Spade character.
That is the biggest problem with this film — we've seen these characters and heard these same jokes before. Heder's character is practically Napoleon Dynamite with a baseball bat, and Schneider's and Spade's characters are the same ones you see in "Deuce Bigalow" or "Tommy Boy."
The ending has some positives and the message that all kids should be able to participate in sports is a good one, but films can't just rely on a message to carry them when the laughs leave and the jokes are nonexistent.
These three actors have the talent to become really good comedians, but until they create characters instead of show off their personalities, they will remain out of the spotlight and on the bench.
