Mark Wahlberg’s Trashed Comedy Just Topped Prime Video’s Global Rankings
Thirty Percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Number One Anyway.
Critics lined up to bury it. One called it “criminally atrocious.” Another said the title said everything you needed to know. Balls Up, Mark Wahlberg’s new action comedy, landed with a thud on Rotten Tomatoes — 30% from critics, an audience score somehow even lower at 25%. By every conventional measure, this was a wreck.
And yet it sits at the top of Prime Video’s global top 10 this week. It beat out Chris Hemsworth’s Crime 101, Chris Pratt’s Mercy, and Omar Chaparro’s Vengeance to take the top spot. The film premiered on the platform April 15 and needed only days to climb there. Whatever critics think, viewers are clicking play.
Two Executives, One World Cup, Total Chaos
The setup is deliberately unhinged. Two American marketing rivals travel to the World Cup Final to pitch a condom sponsorship deal. It goes sideways fast. What starts as a routine work trip escalates into a full-blown international incident, with the two men forced to lean on sheer luck and each other to survive. Equal parts action and gross-out comedy, with the emphasis firmly on gross-out.
Wahlberg plays one executive opposite Paul Walter Hauser, the quietly magnetic actor who earned serious praise for Black Bird. The supporting cast is stacked: Sacha Baron Cohen, Benjamin Bratt, Daniela Melchior, Molly Shannon, Eric Andre, and Luciano Szafir. Peter Farrelly, the director behind Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary, helmed the film from a script by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the duo responsible for Deadpool & Wolverine and Zombieland. On paper, this crew should not produce a dud.
Wahlberg Wasn’t Apologizing
At the premiere, Wahlberg owned every frame of it. “It’s one of the most outrageous comedies I’ve been a part of,” he said, putting it alongside Ted and The Other Guys in his raunchy comedy catalog. No hedging, no distance. He called it a wild adventure and said people actually love the movie. He wasn’t wrong about the last part.
“This is a disaster.” — John Nugent, Empire Magazine
Empire’s John Nugent was blunt. Critic Russ Simmons found nothing remotely redeeming in the whole production. Several reviewers called the humor outdated, the concept crass, the jokes punching downward with no particular aim. The film absorbed all of it and kept climbing the charts anyway.
That gap between critical consensus and viewer behavior isn’t new, but it’s rarely this stark. Balls Up is now streaming on Prime Video, where audiences are making up their own minds.
