With the Fifa World Cup just around the corner and taking place in North America for the first time since 1994, it’s perhaps surprising that Amazon MGM is the first and only studio to try and shoehorn football into a film to make it feel relevant this year. That attempt comes in the form of the straight-to-streaming raunchy comedy Balls Up, premiering on Prime Video, which combines footballs with literal balls to deliver a few cheap laughs among the all too familiar painfully unfunny moments.

Balls Up follows Brad (Mark Wahlberg) and Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser), marketing executives at a condom company who get fired for blowing a sponsorship pitch to become the official condom partner for the Brazil World Cup. Even so, during the process, they somehow manage to score free VIP tickets to the World Cup final, quite literally the hottest ticket in the world, just look at the prices for this year’s final. While at the match, the pair accidentally stop Brazil scoring the equaliser, causing them to lose the final and become the most hated men in the country. With the entire Brazilian population now hunting them down for revenge, the pair must find a way to survive and escape the country alive.

Coming from Oscar-winning director Peter Farrelly, you’d be forgiven for expecting some level of quality from Balls Up. However, thanks in part to the extremely messy script by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, alongside poor execution, it becomes a grind to get through. The premise, which could be likened to bargain bin straight-to-DVD films of the early 2000s, could’ve been great fun, but the endless cheap penis jokes and some of the laziest stereotypes imaginable mean laughs are as common as Tottenham winning a football match, which for readers who don’t follow football, is like finding water in the Sahara Desert.

Wahlberg and Walter Hauser, both talented actors in their own right, have little to no chemistry for far too long. Admittedly, they are let down by the material they are asked to deliver, but for large stretches they look like they don’t want to be there at all. So when the genuinely fun moments between the two do arrive, predominantly in the final act, there’s a good chance a large portion of the audience will have already switched off. That said, there’s one scene where the pair sing karaoke together halfway through that is perhaps the most enjoyable in the entire film.

In a supporting role, Sacha Baron Cohen is asked to play a drug cartel leader with a Borat-style accent. It’s painfully obvious this thick, over the top voice is supposed to be funny, but for the most part it’s incredibly cringey and completely unfunny in a role I’m sure Cohen will look back on and wonder what he was doing at the time.

The remainder of the film takes on more of an action comedy angle and should provide a fun adventure as Wahlberg and Walter Hauser’s characters try to escape the peril they’re in, but it never shakes the feeling that it is always coasting in second gear. There are a few glimpses of Farrelly’s past raunchy comedies, but they remain very few and far between, far less common than jokes about cocaine, which always seem to be the punchline.

So unfortunately its Balls Up by name Balls Up by nature as it fails to live up to the expectations its strong cast and production team create, instead feeling much more like an own goal much like Farrelly’s last streaming effort Ricky Stanicky. It’s certainly not the worst comedy you’re likely to see this year, but Balls Up definitely tries its best to be in that conversation, unfortunately not being worth your time even as background noise.