Title – Balls Up (2026)

Director – Peter Farrelly (The Greatest Beer Run Ever)

Cast – Mark Wahlberg, Paul Walter Hauser, Sacha Baron Cohen, Benjamin Bratt, Molly Shannon

Plot – Recently fired from their company, frenemies Brad (Wahlberg) and Elijah (Hauser) find themselves in deep trouble when their antics at the Brazilian World Cup put them in the spotlight in the worst way possible.

“Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?”

Review by Eddie on 27/04/2026

It’s crazy to think back to 7 years ago, that there was a time in human history where writer/director Peter Farrelly was collecting Oscars for his work on enjoyable if highly overrated Green Book.

Since that triumphant time, the man who helped give life to the likes of Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary and Me, Myself and Irene has burnt much of his earned goodwill on mediocre TV product and feature films like The Greatest Beer Run Ever and Ricky Stanicky, all of which look like masterpieces when weighed up against Farrelly’s latest streaming outing Balls Up.

A collaboration with Zombieland and Deadpool screenwriters Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, the mostly Australian shot Balls Up finds Farrelly enlisting the support of Mark Wahlberg and Paul Walter Hauser for a very late 90’s/early 2000’s feeling comedy that certainly could’ve been a guilty pleasure winner, that instead becomes a monotonous trudge, failing to inspire much in the way of laughs across its arduous running time.

Long lost in career doldrums that have been in operation for the better part of the last decade with the likes of the Daddy’s Home series, misguided Transformers, Flight Risk and a raft of streaming “comedies” ruining many a worthy project, Balls Up finds Wahlberg in a distinctively uninterested autopilot mode, sadly dragging down the usually great Hauser with him, in what is a new career low for the Emmy nominee.

We have come to expect very little from Wahlberg for good reason but watching Hauser fall from the highs of I, Tonya, Richard Jewell and undervalued mini-series Black Bird to what he does here as a condom designing buffoon is more than slightly depressing, adding to the icky feeling of Balls Up overall as it fails to convince us that this is just one of those silly films that can dismissed as a gentle and non-offensive piece of comedic entertainment.

With a bare bones plot that is centred around Wahlberg’s smooth-talking Brad and Hauser’s mostly hapless Elijah finding themselves public enemy number one after a football world cup incident sends them running for the hills, it’s not like we as viewers ever expected a masterpiece from Farrelly and his team but what we get here can barely be classified as a movie in what amounts to a procession of predicaments that rarely manage to raise a slight chuckle from the audience.

There’re a few smatterings of the dumb distraction that might’ve been, an extended appearance by a hamming it up Sacha Baron Cohen as Brazilian crime lord Pavio Curto generates some enthusiasm but after a near endless procession of smutty jokes that don’t land, zero chemistry between the two leads and lazy filmmaking that makes one wonder if anyone that was a part of this affair cared in the slightest, Balls Up is exactly that in a finished product sense, generating little reason to care about this unfunny offering that tarnishes the name of all that partook in its production.

Final Say –

One time comedy genius Peter Farrelly continues to falter in the director’s chair with his Mark Wahlberg led effort as bad of a film as he has conjured up across his long-standing career.

1 famous sister out of 5