Lady Ballers is uneven red-meat fare with serious shortcomings

In March 2023, the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, a devout Catholic, set off a firestorm by stating bluntly, “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” With some biological males identifying as women and now competing against biological women in sports, our ballparks, tracks, arenas, and stadiums may be early battlegrounds following Knowles’ opening salvo. Religious convictions aside, some female athletes, along with some parents, are understandably fed up.

The new movie Lady Ballers, the first feature comedy from the Daily Wire, explores the terrain. Billing the movie as “the decade’s most triggering comedy,” the Daily Wire’s website states that they are “building the future you want to see,” making original content to compete with Hollywood. In certain ways, Lady Ballers may provide encouragement, or at least temporary amusement, to us who have some affinity for Knowles’ position on transgenderism; but in other ways, the film is a dispiriting omen for what we may expect from more conservative artistic endeavors. Do we need a flip-side to Hollywood’s coin, or should we create a whole new currency?

First, I liked some things about Lady Ballers, which hearkens back to 2000’s bro comedies like Dodgeball and Old School. Directed by, co-written by, and starring the Daily Wire’s co-founder, Jeremy Boreing, Lady Ballers is about a group of thirty-something former high school basketball stars who regroup to relive their glory days and capitalize on loopholes in transgender inclusion policies. Boreing’s character, Coach Rob Gibson, represents a growing segment of the population radicalized by personal experience. He is not particularly conservative or religious. Rather, he is scandalized by his young daughter, who returns from school telling him about a “girl” who showed off “her” penis. Disturbing and funny stuff.

As Coach Rob’s life goes off the rails, he finds one of his former players, Alex, played by newcomer Daniel Considine, working as a server in a restaurant where the staff members dress in drag. Lady Ballers is no Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Some Like it Hot, but it aims for a venerable comedic target. To the approval of Rob’s ex-wife’s hippy boyfriend, Kris, played by the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh (more anon), the old state-champion Tigers transform into a woman’s team. The first few times Lady Ballers shows us dudes with wigs posterizing teenage girls, it is hilarious.

But ultimately, the story gets serious. We are asked to consider: If pharmaceuticals and surgeries cannot change a man into a woman—let alone a wardrobe change—then what can help him be who he was born to be? In my favorite scene of the film, Lady Ballers suggests the answer is sympathy—suffering with. Kudos to Boreing, whose writing and acting come together in one touching moment to suggest a harder, nobler path that no one can walk alone.

Now for my concerns.

Although Lady Ballers is Boreing’s project, the figure of Matt Walsh looms over it. No one embodies the stick-it-to-the-Libs attitude of the Daily Wire more than Walsh. His 2022 documentary What is a Woman? has done for the Right what Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine did for the Left; and like Moore, Walsh always walks a fine line, daring his enemies to flinch at his deadpan demeanor. I liked What is a Woman? pretty well, but Walsh’s method has a way of wearing thin. We can point out the emperor has no clothes until the cows come home, but some people simply will not care. Feelings don’t always care about your facts.

Now, if high-fiving fellow patriots, gender traditionalists, and God-fearers is the point, then Lady Ballers succeeds. But if the goal is making quality films that transform the culture, then Lady Ballers is a disappointing first effort in the organization’s stated campaign against Hollywood. I am thinking of an episode of Mike Judge’s King of the Hill where Bobby becomes interested in Christian rock music, and Hank tells the tattooed youth pastor, “Can’t you see you’re not making Christianity better? You’re making rock and roll worse!” So it often goes nowadays with stated ideological or religious alternatives to mainstream offerings.

Accordingly, the meat of Lady Ballers is grade C ground chuck—passé satirical training montages, cameos from Daily Wire personalities, lukewarm raunch, and the aforementioned superabundance of males beating women at sports. Overall, I am sorry to say, Lady Ballers feels like a student film.

As for the acting, I have already annoyed Daily Wire devotees on X (formerly Twitter). But in for a penny, in for a pound. On December 4, 2023, Matt Walsh posted,

This is what sets the Daily Wire apart from any other conservative media company. We wanted to make a sports comedy mocking the trans insanity. We couldn’t find enough actors brave enough to star in the film, so we just played the characters ourselves. Just that fact alone is as funny as anything in the film.

I found Walsh’s statement strange, so I reposted it as the start to my own commentary thread, which begins here:

I’m withholding judgment on the movie until I see it – likely this week. But in my book making feature films without real actors isn’t something to brag about. “Funny” indeed.

My repost has received 432,000 views to date, with 139 comments to 27 likes, indicating I have been “ratioed,” as they say. Comment after comment accuses me of everything from snobbishness (“You mean actors you have heard of…”), to ignorance of basic vocabulary (anyone who acts is actor), to forgetting about acclaimed realist cinema that deliberately avoids professional actors.

But the thing is, Lady Ballers does not pretend to be a Rossellini or Dardenne Brothers film. Adam McKay’s 2004 classic The Anchorman succeeds, for example, because it is unafraid to spray risqué and politically incorrect jokes in all directions; more importantly, its cast is chock full of the highest caliber comedians of the era. To think just anyone can do what Will Ferrell does is folly. And to this point, although a lot of Lady Ballers fans did not like my use of the term “real” actors, I stand by it. We all know the difference. Boreing, Walsh, and Considine are all decent in Lady Ballers, but much of the rest of the cast is not. And the fact of poor acting is not really “funny” to me; rather, it suggests that the purpose of “conservative” cinema is simply to make fun of cinema full stop. No good comedy does this.

On the contrary, I believe the Daily Wire is sincere in wanting to create good movies, which is why I was most disturbed when a lot of commentators on my re-post noted that this is not a film requiring high-caliber acting skills—precisely the problem I have with it. Lady Ballers is just ok. It is a red-meat fan-service product for people who feel like part of the in-crowd. And maybe that is enough for the Daily Wire’s first foray into feature comedy films—get a win at home before taking the show on the road. But if they are serious about offering an alternative to the agenda-driven Hollywood machine, whose aesthetic values, by the way, have dropped off as fast as its morals, then the Daily Wire is going to have to do much better than mere pastiche. Otherwise, we have something so-so going up against a whole so-so industry. No, thanks.

Finally and more seriously, it is hard to watch Lady Ballers and imagine a future without the mainstream transgenderism that concerns Michael Knowles. Instead, I believe the film may help achieve the opposite by making light of it. Lady Ballers takes the great anthropological crisis of our time and unwittingly makes it a matter of preference—take it seriously with the Libs in their mediocre movies or laugh at it with the Daily Wire in theirs. As the credits rolled, I found myself as incredulous as Candace Owens, who says to Walsh after he breaks character at the end of the film: “I don’t understand how anything you did helped make the situation better.”

Eventually, even the Daily Wire’s fans may come to see how the label “conservative” gets in the way of creating art that speaks to the complexity of the human experience and is actually able to conserve or react. Surely, if conspicuously “progressive” art is facile and ham-handed, then conservative alternatives are likely to be too. Ask Christopher Nolan or Steven Spielberg what their respective politics are and they may or may not tell you. But their films are always aimed at a mass audience, and they rarely if ever get mired in ideology, showing us something more profound about what humans are made for. That’s art—highbrow, lowbrow and everything in between.

In the meantime, with a whole slate of upcoming films and television offerings advertised on the Daily Wire website, I hold out hope that something of higher value than Lady Ballers is on the way.