YMMV / Heavyweights

• Accidental Aesop: Don't mistreat the people around you. Tony's problem isn't his (totally understandable) desire for the kids to get in shape but his unhinged abuse of everyone around him. Had Tony not badmouthed Pat at the wrong moment, likely, he wouldn't have been dismissed from his job and forced to sell healing crystals for a living.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • The campers putting Tony in a cage and Pat leaving him there after the nutjob pushes his luck is more than he deserved for his cruel behavior.
  • The MVP kids are such smug assholes that anytime they get their comeuppance is fun to watch.
• Cult Classic: It wasn't a success in theaters, but it later became this thanks to strong home video sales, repeated airings on Disney Channel, Ben Stiller becoming a big star, and Judd Apatow's writing/directing career taking off.
• Epileptic Trees: Thanks to Ben Stiller playing both, as well as both characters having similar personalities, it's common for people to believe that Tony Perkis is White Goodman, Stiller's character from DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story. Amusingly, thanks to Disney buying Fox, both are now under the same roof.
• Fair for Its Day: Although it's a comedy and features lots of fat jokes (and one rather mean reference to anorexia), the movie is overall sympathetic to overweight people, both children and adults. It's notable for making the "fat kids" the heroes and championing body positivity, something that still makes it stands out today. See Values Resonance below.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Shaun Weiss became much skinnier in adulthood. Unfortunately, it was primarily due to drug addiction.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The shot of the kid with the marshmallow creme facepaint having chocolate thrown at his mouth ends looking strangely like a Juggalo, who are known for having similar facepaint schemes (but not with chocolate and marshmallow creme).
  • Aaron Schwartz (Gerry) wound up losing a lot of weight by the time he became an adult and actually resembles the doctored version of his character on Tony's fitness video cover.
• Informed Wrongness: While Tony is a cruel dick, his confiscating the camper's junk food stash is treated as an act of evil even though its something that is more or less his job as the owner of a fat camp. Even the most permissive parent would be alarmed at the number of snacks those kids had.
• Love to Hate: Tony is batshit crazy...but in an entertaining way that grabs attention.
• Memetic Mutation: Tony Perkis and most to all of his dialogue have become an Internet meme, with his popularity continuing to overshadow the critical reception to the movie itself.
• Moral Event Horizon: Tony was a complete douchebag the whole movie, but when the failure of the campers to lose weight pushes him too far, he decides that anyone who hasn't met their weight loss goals will be forced to join him in a 20-mile hike through the wilderness. And when they actually pull it off, he decides to take them to climb a massive rock face barehanded; Fridge Horror would presume that Tony probably didn't bring any actual mountain climbing equipment with him like harnesses or ropes, making this a life-threatening idea. Even physically fit children would struggle to get through a day like this. Little wonder this announcement, on top of Tony pulling a deranged state when the campers want "fun", was the last straw that made the campers take drastic actions to overthrow him.
• Narm:
  • The kid who says "I think they cheatin'" is easily the worst actor in the film and his entire bit in the film clearly shows that he's not an actor by trade.
  • Gerry's letter to his grandmother begins "Somebody once said War Is Hell, but they'd never been to fat camp." This is before Tony completely loses his mind and turns into a psychopath, at this point all he had been done was confiscate their hidden stores of food and remove some of the recreational facilities. It does come off as played-for-comedy melodrama, though, especially in comparison to what happens next.
• Narm Charm: Ben Stiller's hammy performance, while comical, is still pretty unsettling.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Kenan Thompson appears as Roy in his second film role.
  • Tim is played by Paul Feig who many know as the director of Bridesmaids, Spy, and the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot.
  • Tim Blake Nelson as the man who got Gerry into Camp Hope.
• Strawman Has a Point: In the scene where Tony conducts a weigh-in of the campers, all of whom have gained weight, he has a breakdown and screams about how it isn't his fault, it's their fault and they have failed. This is played as showing Tony's Sanity Slippage, but he's right — the kids found where he was hiding their confiscated stashes of junk food and have been cheating. While there's no excuse for Tony getting so unhinged over it, his words are completely accurate. With that being said, the movie actually does attempt to recognize Tony's right in at least some sense - Pat calls out the campers later on saying they have to take responsibility for themselves and they do manage to develop better eating habits. Tony's anger at the campers having gained weight from cheating is somewhat diminished because his increasingly unhinged methods were only making everyone miserable and less interested in losing weight (and in any case, Tony's chief concern had always been selling his brand of fitness; helping the kids lose weight was no more than a means to that end).
• Tear Jerker:
  • Tony's attempt to "motivate" the campers is a combination of cruelty and bullying. He deliberately invites popular girls to dance just to make them even more insecure.
  • The MVP campers are all too happy to vandalize Camp Hope and even use a megaphone to shout about how much the fat kids stink.
• Unintentional Period Piece
  • The campers are isolated with no way to reach out to find help, and their parents don't believe them when they call. With the advent of smartphones and social media, a few videos of what Tony was doing to them would certainly have gotten some sort of attention. Even if Tony confiscated the campers' phones, he surely wouldn't have taken them from his staff who empathize with the campers. For that matter, there would be no need to ask Kenny the cameraman for his footage.
  • During the Apache Relay, a Camp MVP camper struggles to name five American Vice Presidents and only comes up with one (and he mispronounces Dan Quayle's last name as "Quill"). With how much more prominent politics is in today's media, most people could name every Vice President back to Al Gore under Bill Clinton, and possibly know of Quayle as well. Though ironically, the joke is funnier now because of that — that the MVP camper can't even name one correctly makes him look even dumber, and it emphasizes how smart Nicholas is that he, a British kid, can name five historical Vice Presidents (Levi P. Morton, John C. Calhoun, Hubert Humphrey, Spiro Agnew and Walter Mondale), not just the most recent ones.
• Values Dissonance: The Apache Relay, which features the almost entirely white roster of campers (and Pat) in stereotypical Native American outfits and makeup. While it may be true to how many American summer camps operated in the '90s, it's nowadays seen as a blatant example of cultural appropriation.
• Values Resonance:
  • In recent decades, the fraudulent techniques promoted by many "fitness gurus", as well the greater awareness of the psychological damage caused by bullying and fat-shaming, has made the villainy of both Tony and the MVP kids even more apparent than it was in the mid-'90s.
  • The final message about dieting in the third act still holds up today. Namely, that there's nothing wrong with being overweight, but that it's also important to be responsible when it comes to diet and exercise. Pat, by the end, emphasizes these fitness and health aspects of weight loss without abandoning the principle that everyone should feel welcome and encouraged, and never made to feel ashamed of how they look.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Despite being intended as a family film, the script was written by Judd Apatow and it contains many elements that would later appear in his adult films such as jokes about genitalia.

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