August 28, 2007 - Brad "Lucky Cricket" Smoley (Columnist)
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"BREAK YO'SELF, FOOL! BLAT BLAT!" |
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There's been a glut of goof-ball comedies coming out of Hollywood lately with a quazi-sports leaning. "Sorta-sports" like Ice Dancing, Dodgeball and NASCAR have all gotten the ridiculous knee-slapper treatment, and not to be left out in the cold, Table Tennis (Ping Pong to the Chinese) has decided to spike it's tiny plastic ball onto the scene as well. Balls of Fury, written and directed by alums of The State and Reno 911, Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, tackles the seedy underbelly of the world of competitive table tennis and does so with a great deal of laughs, but often ends up feeling a bit uneven in the process.
Randy Daytona, or "Not Jack Black" as I came to call him over the course the film's 90 minutes, used to be the most promising prospect in the world of table tennis until his father's gambling problems distracted him right out of the world championships. Of course, his father owed money to the mysterious crime lord simply known as "Feng" who had him killed, forever scarring Randy's will to play ping pong. Twenty years later, Randy is called on by the FBI to go undercover and infiltrate Feng's underground table tennis tournament to help them bring down the illusive crime boss.
This isn't high-art we're talking about here.
Dan Fogler, who plays Randy, does a good Jack Black-style job of being bloated, charming, and fall-down funny. Literally... he does a lot of slapstick. But seriously, the part seems tailored specifically for an absent Jack Black, which was a bit distracting to me, but only a bit. I'm a huge Tenacious D dork, though, so your mileage will obviously vary. The mystical chinese ping pong warlord Feng is played by a scenery-chewing Christopher Walken, a character they thankfully never acknowledge is not chinese. Walken plays things with a sort of uneven grace that is hysterical one second, but very flat the next. It's as if they relied on Walken being Walken a little too much when maybe a bit more focus could have been trained on some of his bits.
And that's sort of the vibe of the whole film. In some areas it tries a bit too hard to squeeze a laugh out of the audience where it shouldn't and in other places it doesn't try nearly hard enough to bring "the funny". There are some bits that are uproariously funny and others that are almost completely dead. But generally, the film is very funny if not a bit bumpy in its execution.
Oh, and don't even get me started on the ridiculously implausible romantic thread running through the movie. I mean, I know it's a silly comedy, but come on. Either play the thing as a joke, explain it better, or don't even bother. Meh. It's not even that big of a deal, I just thought I'd bring it up.
The supporting cast is pretty serviceable and is loaded with fun b/c-list cameos. Also, I'll watch anything with James Hong in it. The guy's a legend. Maggie Q is a cutie.
I will give the movie points for its appropriate integration of CGI into the story. Special effects work best when you can't tell they are there, and in Balls of Fury, there's a lot of necessary graphical enhancement. There's no way it's humanly possible to do some of the things that these people do with ping pong balls, and the effects are great at picking up that slack. Good work, guys.
Garant and Lennon make a couple of nods to fans of The State and Reno 911, which are fun little additions, even if they're blinkably missable. Overall, Balls of Fury is a decent time with a lot of good laughs, but probably isn't worth your 10 bucks at the movies unless you're really into the guys from The State, cheesy-ball comedies, or table tennis.
 6/10
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