DailyWire’s Lady Ballers was released on the DW+ platform Friday night. It tells the story of a former high school basketball coach whose life has fallen apart as the world has changed around him. It’s a pretty standard set up for a Dad comedy and it delivers as a basically standard “getting the band back together” story.
Coach Rob (our protagonist played by director/co-writer/co-CEO Jeremy Boreing) falls backwards into a scam where he realizes that no one will stop him from registering a man into women’s sporting events. Then an unscrupulous local reporter sees her opportunity to make a splash and build a story around the beautiful bravery of a transgender athlete. From there he reassembles his last state championship high school basketball team (2008 graduates) to dominate the qualifying rounds of a women’s basketball tournament.
The trailers promise a movie that will trigger all the right people and step on all the right toes, but the movie itself surprised me by delivering a real movie. The premise does the toe smashing, but the movie doesn’t go out of its way to be cruel to anyone. Well, let me take that back a little bit because your mileage may vary. There is a certain kind of extremely online person (who won’t actually see this movie) that believes there is an ongoing trans-genocide in America. Those people will see nothing but cruelty here.
If you’ve watched much Christian cinema in the last could of decades this will all be very familiar to you. There is a serviceable cast of amateur level players and easy to spot setups of message moments. In this case instead of a helpful friend coming by with the right bible verse at the right time it’s heartfelt moments between a coach and his players or a father and his daughter. What sets it apart from its faith-based second cousins is that Lady Ballers is meant to be a broad comedy.
DailyWire never skimps on the technicals of moviemaking and Lady Ballers looks every bit a sports comedy. The writing, direction, and acting are all better than I’ve come to expect from niche streaming services. The DW leadership has never made a secret of their business strategy for scripted content. They don’t want to go toe-to-toe with Hollywood yet. Instead, the plan is to create content in spaces that have been largely abandoned the big studios, comedy is one such space and Lady Ballers delivers some decent laughs to a criminally under-served audience.
Things could have been tightened up and there are a couple requiring gags that overstayed their welcome, but on the whole, Good job DailyWire.
7/10 from Martin Stone.
PS – Mrs. Stone gave it an 8/10 because is goes after the left and was funny
