The Benchwarmers 2006

Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle: It's a movie packed with so many idiot characters that Rob Schneider is cast as the cool guy -- and sort of pulls it off. Read more

Nathan Rabin, AV Club: Like pretty much everything else bearing Happy Madison's name, The Benchwarmers kind of sucks. Read more

Bill Muller, Arizona Republic: It's so bad, it should be viewed only through a pinhole in a shoebox, much like an eclipse. Read more

James Parker, Boston Globe: It gives me a perverse pleasure to announce that The Benchwarmers is not terrible, not terrible at all. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: The three losers play a series of Little League teams, snatching victory from the jaws of slapstick humiliation. Read more

Ben Kenigsberg, L.A. Weekly: It's hard to buy the movie as an underdog success story, since even the actors barely seem to exert themselves. Read more

Gene Seymour, Newsday: Let the vomit-and-gas jokes begin! Read more

Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News: If Sandler had avoided the lowest-common-denominator humor, recast the adult ballplayers as kids, and found a decent director, he might have had a worthwhile movie. Oh, wait -- it's already been made. And it's called Bad News Bears. Read more

Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel: [The Benchwarmers] severely tests the maxim that 'There's no such thing as a bad movie about baseball.' Read more

Trevor Johnston, Time Out: Just when the baseball slapstick starts wearing thin, a final-reel gush of truly cynical sentiment on behalf of the physically challenged sends the ordeal-factor off the scale. Read more

Joe Leydon, Variety: Schneider winds up playing straight man to Spade, who once again relies on his snarky coward shtick, and Heder, who comes across like someone doing a bad imitation of ... well, Heder himself in Napoleon Dynamite. Read more