Sports and sports movies often lend themselves to self-aggrandizement. For professional athletes, it’s understandable: they’ve demonstrated an ability to perform their selected skill at a higher level than nearly every other human being on the planet. The same cannot be said for the amateur athlete. Despite that, the spillover effect of sports-star-cockiness infects regular gym rats everywhere, instilling self-important bros with brash bravado. Dreams of highly celebrated athletic achievements get reduced to victories in flag football scrimmages.

With Balls Out, Director Andrew Disney collects an assortment of upcoming sketch and improv stars to satirize the predictable sports underdog movie subgenre, while deflating the egos of anyone who has ever played backyard sports. Caleb (Jake Lacy) and his college friends attempt to recapture the magic that lead to their winning the intramural flag football championship in their freshman year. Caleb hasn’t seen any of the group since throwing the championship-winning pass that crippled his teammate Grant (Nick Kocher). But in his 5th year at 4-year college, with both marriage and a career on the horizon, Caleb throws himself back into “something that doesn’t matter” by reuniting the old team.

Like the 2004 Ben Stiller/Vince Vaughn vehicle DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story, Balls Out seeks to undermine the genre by re-appropriating its tropes to an inherently insignificant situation. Balls Out goes one step further than its more mainstream predecessor by frequently and openly calling attention to its own story beats. When a wheelchair-bound Grant returns to the flag football team, he acknowledges his own shift to a gruff persona in order to assume the role of the team’s vulgar, grizzled coach/mentor. He melodramatically narrates the training montage, barks nonsensical orders and refers to his team as a ragtag bunch in hopes of inspiring their success.

That irreverent approach both helps and hurts Balls Out in different moments. The film is dense with scattershot punch lines. While not all of them land, the hit-to-miss ratio is solid enough to remain entertaining during the stretches when the film doesn’t take itself seriously. Balls Out might find its gang of roller-rink-dwelling homeless men funnier than I do; however, with a cast featuring Saturday Night Live contributors (Kate McKinnon, Beck Bennett, Nicholas Rutherford and Jay Pharoah), the BritaNick team (Kocher and Brian McElhaney), as well as a Derrick Comedy alum (D.C. Pierson) the comedic ability sells a majority of the jokes.

The satirical throughline is largely absent from Balls Out’s superfluous romantic subplot with the ever-charming Nikki Reed. Whereas the majority of this comedy lampoons clichéd story beats, this section to Balls Out could have just as easily been lifted into a movie starring Katherine Heigl and James Marsden. Both Lacy and Reed provide an affable presence, but their relationship is so clearly forecasted in the script that there’s little reason to care whenever her character is in a scene. Likewise, at 100 minutes long, the film could have probably lost a couple of its strikingly shot but minimally funny flag football montages.

Often, Balls Out is just pleasant enough. Its hilarious cast and the frequency of its laughs offer the movie a kind of lazy weekend VOD appeal, but its story lacks the ingenuity necessary to invest in these characters. The performances are the main reason to check out the film, if only to see some of these funny faces before they become staples of the next generation of comedy (scene stealer Kate McKinnon is already a female lead in Paul Feig’s upcoming all-female Ghostbusters reboot). Balls Out’s giggle inducing send up of sports movies is absurd fun, but its boilerplate plot is stretched transparently thin.

I’m not going to lie, the primary reason In Your Eyes caught my attention is that Joss Whedon wrote and produced the film. And I’m guessing I’m not alone. Whedon began earning fans many years ago with his high-concept sci-fi television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Serenity. Then he made The Avengers. His Marvel Comics film was a massive commercial success (reaching the third all-time highest grossing film at the box office), quickly cementing himself as one of Hollywood’s most powerful directors. Sadly, In Your Eyes is a disappointing melodrama, featuring a decent concept that gets compromised by a generic and familiar love story.

In Your Eyes begins with a young girl named Rebecca clinging her sled tightly as she studies the snowy New Hampshire hill with great focus. It’s apparent something bad is about to happen when the overly dramatic score kicks in right as her mother pleads for her to be careful. As she races down the hill, the film jumps to a boy clutching his desk at school. Suddenly he can somehow see exactly what she does. When her sled slams into a tree, they simultaneously get knocked unconscious. These two characters don’t share the inexplicable psychic connection again until twenty years later.

The film removes the soft focus filter to indicate present day, reintroducing the characters as adults now. Dylan (Michael Stahl-David) is an ex-convict who lives in a trailer home in the New Mexico desert, while Rebecca (Zoe Kazan) is unhappily married to a wealthy doctor in New Hampshire. On a random afternoon, their strange connection suddenly comes back, allowing them to see through each other’s eyes once again. As an added bonus, the two are now also able to talk to each other. Without really questioning these powers, the two soon become best friends and engage in flirtatious conversations. It’s easy to guess what happens next.

The running joke of the film is how others react to these two talking out loud to “themselves” in public. This is funny the first couple of times, especially when Rebecca interrupts Dylan’s romantic date with another woman, but the gig gets old pretty fast. When others catch them talking out loud, they often grab their phone to pretend they’re having a conversation on the phone. Because cell phones do exist in their world, I wondered why they didn’t just call each other, instead of looking like weirdos to everyone. Perhaps to save minutes on their cell phone plans?

Admittedly, trying to justify the logistics of the film is pointless. Regardless of how (or why) these two are able to communicate, the concept of a long-distance relationship between two people who’ve never met is enchanting and relevant. While films like Spike Jonze’s Her depict falling in love with someone you’ve never met more effectively, In Your Eyes does a good job exploring how love knows no bounds.

Despite the concept being moderately interesting, poor and straightforward execution renders In Your Eyes mostly ineffective. Many lines in the film are delivered unnaturally, making the dialogue sound painfully awkward and sometimes downright cringe-worthy. Also, the film never really feels like a true Whedon production. By establishing all the metaphysical fantasy elements at the beginning, the storyline eliminates all surprises by taking the safest and most predictable route the rest of the way. Therefore, the story lacks the fresh Whedon spin we typically receive from him. Unlike his other work, In Your Eyes consists of a dull, vulnerable, and powerless role for the lead female, and that’s highly disappointing.