On this episode of Cinematic Underdogs, Jordan Puga and Paul Keelan are confronted with a film that exists on the threshold of the podcast's dedicated genre: should Heavyweights be considered a sports film at all? Beyond this dilemma, we are also perplexed by the assortment of tones and sensibilities in this strange curio. Produced, created, distributed, and marketed by Disney as a kid's comedy, Heavyweights veers into foreign territory and is certainly not the expected lightweight fare that its brand name is so famous for. The reason for this incongruity is plain and simple: Ben Stiller's character Tony Perkins.
A sociopathic fitness guru celebrity without a shred of compassion in his overzealous, caloric-obsessed brain, Tony Perkins is a riot from the moment he steps onto the screen: disrupting the otherwise hackneyed screenplay of a misfit group of obese kids enjoying a summer camp with similarly built peers. Zany, intense, unpredictable, and hard to pinpoint, Heavyweights is anomalous in almost every way one chooses to look at it. And that is what precisely makes the film so irresistibly intriguing, flaws and all.
So grab a sub sandwich, a glass of wheatgrass, enjoy our dialectic about a film that has slowly attracted a cult following, and decided for yourself: is Heavyweights an overrated or an underdog entry into the universe of 90's Disney Kids Sports Movies?
