Balls Out: Gary the Tennis Coach

Armed with Seann William Scott’s gloriously over-the-top turn as the title character, Balls Out: Gary the Tennis Coach almost manages to overcome its tedious storyline and hopelessly erratic pace to become a minor comedic masterpiece – yet there eventually does reach a point at which Scott’s performance, ingratiating as it is, simply proves unable to compensate for the film’s myriad of deficiencies. And while the almost Napoleon Dynamite-esque sensibilities of Andy Stock and Rick Stempson’s screenplay might be enough to sustain the interest of certain viewers, it’s ultimately impossible not to view the movie as anything more than a disappointment (albeit one that boasts a central performance that needs to be seen to be believed). Scott stars as Gary Houseman, a tennis pro turned high school janitor who reluctantly agrees to help coach his school’s ragtag tennis team – with the bulk of the proceedings devoted to his efforts at whipping his pathetically incompetent players into champions. It’s a familiar premise that’s generally employed to underwhelming effect by the film’s scripters, with the pair’s decision to emphasize the relentlessly quirky comings and goings of the various supporting characters ultimately exacerbating the plot’s aggressively low-key nature. The creeping realization that there’s virtually nothing pushing the story forward inevitably results in several lulls within the narrative, with the movie’s eye-rollingly hackneyed final half hour finally proving a test to one’s patience – which is a shame, certainly, given the number of genuine belly laughs elicited by Scott’s go-for-broke performance (with the highlight being a sequence in which Gary fruitlessly attempts to teach a foreign student to say “I love Coach Houseman!”)

** out of ****