REVIEW: ‘Balls Up’ Is Bad In Every Way

Prime Video’s direct-to-streaming films have been a mixed bag. Some offer just enough fun to offset bad writing, and others struggle even with a great actor. Balls Up, directed by Peter Farrelly and written by Paul Wernick & Rhett Reese, can’t offset its bad script, no matter how hard it tries. 

Starring Mark Wahlberg, Paul Walter Hauser, Benjamin Bratt, Eva De Dominici, Daniela Melchior, with Molly Shannon, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Eric André, Balls Up is an incoherent film that tries to cover up its warts with raunchy, over-the-top comedy.

In the film, marketing executives Brad (Mark Wahlberg) and Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser) go “balls out” and pitch a bold full‑coverage condom sponsorship with the World Cup. Yes, because what condoms need is a pocket for the balls, and the writers really needed to make jokes about genitalia.

Balls Up’s comedy lives picking the low-hanging fruit.

When they land the account, the duo takes their Brazilian investor (Benjamin Bratt) out for a drunken celebration that quickly escalates from fun to an international incident. With their celebration getting them fired, the two still get to go to the World Cup, but it gets even more hairy from there, with the duo responsible for one of the countries losing the final.

Leaning all the way into soccer stereotypes (some that land and some that don’t), Brad and Elijah find themselves with the whole of Brazil ready to, well, murder them. Throughout the film, they try to escape fans, get abducted by a drug lord played by the always racist Sacha Baron Cohen, and get help from American anti-poaching “activists” in the Amazon.

Unhinged doesn’t begin to capture the film’s narrative trajectory, which moves from story beat to story beat at a rapid pace without being entertaining. Balls Up winds up feeling like a word cloud rather than an actual story, or like a collection of TikTok skits brought together without actually having a connection between any of them. It’s one shock after another, and when the film is doubling down on the raunchy angle, it loses whatever charm it has.

Balls Up does work when Wahlberg and Hauser are on screen together without the large (and badly designed) spectacles around them. The smaller moments when they bicker with each other or make one-liners not connected to any wider point of the film are when the comedy of Balls Up is at its best. But those moments are fleeting, making up maybe 15 minutes across the entire film that come close to being a good time. 

Mark Wahlberg and Paul Walter Hauser’s sparks of comedy aren’t enough to save Balls Up.

Everything else, though, is a muddled mess that feels like an eternity when in reality it’s only one hour and 44 minutes. Every twist in the story feels like another turn that is prolonging a bad trip. Throughout the film, every reveal left me asking, “Are we still going?” and “What the hell is even happening?” The trajectory for the characters’ growth is contrived and inconsistent, even if the actors behind Elijah and Brad do have good chemistry in spots; nothing else about them makes any real sense.

The film’s setting in Brazil is always straddling a vaguely racist line. At times, it feels like a tongue-in-cheek understanding of soccer culture, and at other times, it just feels wrong. And then there is Sacha Baron Cohen, as Pavio Curto, the drug lord. 

With media evolving its Latin American narco trope to be something a bit less misguided and outright racist, thanks to the success of the Narcos franchise and how it launched careers for Latino actors in the United States, Pavio stands out as a remnant from the past. In fact, Cohen’s comedy illustrates how stunted the entire Balls Up film is. We’ve moved past certain things in media, and brown face is one of them. However, if Cohen had to remove that from his arsenal, he would be left with absolutely nothing but his Zionist propaganda. 

Balls Up is irredeemable in every aspect. 

What makes my issues with Pavio all the more interesting is that the rest of the film doesn’t peddle in what he is doing. The film overall lacks the knowledge of soccer to be funny in a sporting way and of the country to be comedic in a dialed-in way that could have made for something entertaining. Instead, we’re left with something messy, unfunny, and relatively boring. 

The abrasive swings in comedic approach make Balls Up a film that never truly understands what it is trying to be, even when it’s just trying to replicate raunchy films of the past. In fact, the film has the worst opening I have ever seen in a film. It’s not even raunchy in a good way, but instead in a juvenile way that makes the room of middle-aged people seem all the more out of touch with modern humor.

Where Ted The Series manages to be irreverent and offensive in a way that lands consistently and doesn’t hold back, it stands as one of the last bastions of raunchy humor in 2026; this Prime Original is the opposite of it. Balls Up is a stark reminder that we just do not get raunchy adult comedies as we used to. Instead, we get empty films that peddle dick jokes as currency and only ever pick the low-hanging fruit. The film is too painfully unfunny to be offensive, well, except for Pavio.

Balls Up is streaming now, exclusively on Prime Video.