Lazing paddles

>> Balls of Fury is a ping-pong comedy
that forgets to be funny

by JEFFREY MALECKI

Poor, gifted Christopher Walken, with his mercurial voice, creepy eyes and ability to ooze both comedy and fear. He’s the main thing the new comedy Balls of Fury has going for it, and no one else in the film lives up to his presence.

In the ’80s, a young American ping-pong star named Randy Daytona (Dan Fogler) quits the sport after his dad is murdered by Triad mobsters for betting on the Olympic tournament. Twenty years later, Randy is washed up, but he’s recruited by the FBI to infiltrate the gang and schooled along the way by a blind ping-pong master (James Hong) and his beautiful niece (Maggie Q). Oh, and by the way, the head of the Triads (Walken), who loves ping-pong, holds an exclusive annual tournament, and of course, he killed Randy’s father.

The mock-heroic formula for this movie is obvious and explicitly written into the film with many cinematic references from The Karate Kid to Bruce Lee. Which is all well and good, but using such a simple device means that this comedy can only be as good as its gags. Unfortunately, they’re far too thin and sporadic to rescue this flick. Balls is saturated with run-of-the-mill joking: facile irony and exaggerated physical pratfalls. Riffing off its name, this movie never passes up an opportunity for a testicular kick or punch.

And all the usual race jokes, fart jokes, nerd jokes and sex jokes are here, and while some are amusing, they’re all telegraphed, slick and empty. Brainless physical humour is so easy to do poorly, but movies like Something About Mary, Dumb and Dumber and Zoolander show that it can be done well (usually by sneaking in more brains). In Balls, we get too much filler and too many annoying ping-pong balls to the face. At least they’ve picked the right sport for the effect: Whereas physical humour should aim lower, for the guts and genitals, with medicine-ball force, Balls is a series of harmless, hollow spheres to the forehead.

Chris Walken is in far too few scenes to save the flick. But he does animate those, and genuinely seems to revel in the dumb absurdity of this movie, something that Balls as a whole is unable to do.

Balls of Fury opens this
Friday, Aug. 31

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