…it’s pretty much what you would expect.

If you haven’t heard of the film, it’s a new product from The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s media company which scored big last year with Matt Walsh’s documentary What Is A Woman?. This isn’t the first feature film The Daily Wire has done; in fact, they’ve put out several: Run Hide Fight, Terror On The Prairie, Shut In and The Hyperions.

But LadyBallers is the first slapstick comedy they’ve done.

And slapstick comedies are very, very hard to hit home runs with. Lots of elements have to come together to create a real comedy classic like Animal House, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Anchorman or Porky’s. You have to have an iconoclastic mindset behind your production and be willing to obliterate the status quo with ridicule, you have to string sight gags together in fast succession, so that the audience isn’t bored, you can’t be especially ham-handed or preachy in your presentation, your actors have to be genuinely funny people with personas which get the audience ready to laugh before they’ve even done anything (think Bill Murray or John Belushi or Eddie Murphy), and you’ve got to land your production on a place the public will agree is a win for the plot and the characters.

After all, remember that a comedy is the opposite of a tragedy. Comedies end well; tragedies don’t.

So here’s the trailer for LadyBallers, which is the #1 streaming movie in America right now…

The premise is obvious, and yes, there’s some potential there. After all, the absurd does tend toward the hilarious – and this transgender sports thing is patently absurd.

How absurd? This actually happened in a congressional hearing on Tuesday…

That lady runs something called the National Women’s Law Center and she just implied that girls will be better off learning to lose gracefully to guys who invade their sports competitions.

And then what? Go make those guys a sandwich?

So yes, there’s a hole LadyBallers can fill, because a comedy about guys who cynically invade women’s sports and take advantage of the weakness of the people in charge of them is both a good vehicle to point out how stupid all of this is, and an opportunity for humor in a bunch of directions.

But does it get there?

The trailer doesn’t really show anything that rivals Trading Places or Coming To America or Sixteen Candles. You can tell this isn’t a classic.

And so it isn’t a surprise when The Critical Drinker comes along and says the movie doesn’t quite get there…

The thing to understand, though, is he’s not saying LadyBallers stinks. He’s saying it’s a run-of-the-mill comedy.

They made this thing for $7 million, which they’ve without question already made back in subscription sales to The Daily Wire. And for $7 million even a mediocre review such as CD gave it admits there are a decent number of laughs.

And this is without a single “name” actor in the cast. They couldn’t get anybody with any film credits to attach to the project, so the cast is made up of Daily Wire contributors and employees. It’s literally a do-it-yourself project.

Given those circumstances, a couple of things can be said.

First, yes – it is awfully difficult to make a great film. There are a very small number of people in the world capable of doing those things, and even the great filmmakers don’t make great films every time they try. Look at Ridley Scott’s long track record of classics and then see the reaction to Napoleon, his latest offering. So anybody who expected LadyBallers to be Blazing Saddles was expecting Jeremy Boreing, who plays lead in the movie and is also the CEO of The Daily Wire, to be Mel Brooks. That’s unrealistic.

Which leads to the second point, which is that here is a media company which is essentially a conservative news and opinion site too big for its britches and bent on bootstrapping itself into an entertainment and news conglomerate and it managed to pull off a run-of-the-mill Hollywood-level comedy film without any Hollywood actors and on a budget probably one-fifth of what it would cost Hollywood to produce.

And a serious movie critic like CD didn’t pan it. He just said it’s OK. He gave it a better review than he gave Napoleon or The Marvels. He’s more ideologically aligned with The Daily Wire than he is with Hollywood, but we’ve seen before that The Critical Drinker is not somebody who particularly plays favorites.

We’re going to watch this film, partially because we want to support what The Daily Wire is doing – something there is a huge need for, and whether it’s their products or those of Angel Studios or other conservative film producers there has to be engagement and encouragement so that the Right’s capability to produce great art is able to develop. But also because while there may be problems with pacing and all the jokes don’t apparently land, there’s entertainment to be had in LadyBallers.

And honestly, after wading through utter crap like Babylon, A Man Called Otto and Your Place Or Mine, the threshold for decent entertainment is a lot more inviting than it used to be. An even remotely entertaining film which doesn’t assault your values is worth two hours of your time.