BASEketball (1998)
★★½ — BASEketball (1998)
There's a moment in BASEketball where the whole absurd premise clicks into place. Two mates, messing around on a driveway, invent a hybrid sport that accidentally takes over America. The sport has rules designed to punish "psyche-outs," players lose points for emotional meltdowns, and the entire thing operates on a logic so stupid it loops back around to genius. For about twenty minutes, you think you might be watching something special. Then the plot turns up, and it starts letting the air out.
Matt Stone and Trey Parker are genuinely funny people. That's not in question. As the brains behind South Park, they've spent decades proving they can skewer American culture with a precision that makes you laugh and wince in equal measure. And when BASEketball is firing, you can see flashes of that same sensibility. The satire of professional sports, the rampant commercialism, the desperate tribalism of fandom, it's all in there, winking at you. Some of the gags are brilliantly stupid in that specific Parker-Stone way, the kind of joke that shouldn't work but lands because the commitment is total.
But a feature film needs more than a funny concept and a handful of solid gags. It needs legs. And this one, honestly, hasn't got them. The middle section sags badly. The pacing turns sluggish in a way that no amount of juvenile humour can paper over, and the film starts leaning on filler when it should be escalating. What works as a sketch premise starts to feel thin when you stretch it to ninety-odd minutes. The satire, which should be drawing blood, ends up mostly prodding and poking. It never really bites.
Stone and Parker are likeable enough on screen, playing versions of themselves as loveable slacker idiots. There's real chemistry there, the kind you can't manufacture, and it carries some scenes further than they deserve. But the supporting characters feel underdeveloped, and the story beats are so predictable you can see each one coming from about three suburbs away. Unlikely heroes, mounting pressure, a villain with a scheme, a crisis of friendship, you know the shape of it before it happens.
Compare it to what they'd do just a year later with South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, which took an even more anarchic premise and somehow made it tighter, funnier, and more pointed than anything here. Or look at Team America: World Police, which is everything BASEketball wants to be. That film found the perfect vehicle for their brand of savage, gleeful satire. This one's still searching for it.
To be fair to it, BASEketball isn't a bad time. If you're in the right mood, with the right company and something cold to drink, the funny bits are genuinely funny. The sport itself remains a brilliant invention, and I'd be lying if I said there weren't moments where I laughed out loud at something completely idiotic. That counts for something. It's the film around those moments that keeps letting you down.
It sits somewhere in the same neighbourhood as the great spoof comedies of earlier decades, and there are hints of the anarchic energy that made films like Airplane! feel so fresh and relentless. But where those films kept the pace merciless and the gags stacked tight, BASEketball gives itself too much room to breathe and not enough material to fill it with.
Two and a half stars. Worth a watch if you're a devotee of early Parker-Stone, or you just fancy something cheerfully daft on a Friday night. But it's a jump shot that clips the rim and bounces out. You can see exactly where it was supposed to go.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1998 | Watched: 2025-09-17
Where to watch
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More from David Zucker: The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988) · Airplane! (1980)
More with Trey Parker: South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999) · Despicable Me 3 (2017) · Team America: World Police (2004)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
