Scan and Pan
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Balls of Fury
Ping pong wunderkind Randy Daytona (Brett DelBuono) competes for a gold medal in the 1988 Olympics, but loses in humiliating fashion to an arrogant East German player (Thomas Lennon). Worse, his father (Robert Patrick) bet heavily on him and is killed on the orders of crime lord Feng (Christopher Walken) when he can't pay his debt. Nineteen years later, the adult Randy (Dan Fogler) is a low-level Reno entertainer until FBI Agent Rodriguez (George Lopez) enlists him in a plan to get to Feng through his underground ping pong tournament.
Writer/director Robert Ben Garant and co-writer Thomas Lennon are two of the three creators of television's Reno 911!, a frequently hilarious parody of police reality shows, so it's a mystery to me how they could make a film so totally bereft of laughs. It's like they've never seen a comedy before and are just making their best guess about how to create one. Perhaps they were replaced by pod people. I don't know. I do know that this film is an abject failure as a comedy. It might have some future use as an instrument of torture, though. The only thing even mildly amusing is the entire cast singing along to Def Leppard during the end credits. And for a film about a ping pong tournament, the competition scenes are almost non-existent.
Tony Award-winner Fogler is likable as Tony, and there are times where you see what a funny guy he could be with the right material, but then the awfulness of the script buries him again. Walken can usually make a film, even a bad one, better simply by his presence, but not this time. Lopez is flat as the FBI agent with James Bond fantasies. DelBuono as the cocky younger Randy, Lennon as the German champion, and James Hong as Randy's trainer fare better despite the material they have to work with. Patrick's scenes are so few that you'll quickly forget he was even in it. Aisha Tyler is too good and too funny to be wasted on the role she has here. Maggie Q is supposed to be the eye candy love interest for the hero, but the poor girl looks so skinny here that I just wanted to offer her some food. Masi Oka of Heroes has a blink and you'll miss it cameo.
How bad is Balls of Fury? There are more laughs to be found in an Ingmar Bergman drama. Dumb comedies can be entertaining. Unfunny ones...well, not so much. Stay far, far away from this one.
[1 out of 5 stars]
I wanted to like it. The trailers suggested it would be a dumb but hilarious parody of martial arts tournament films (Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon in particular). Dumb but hilarious generally works for me. Instead, it's one of the most painfully unfunny films in recent memory.
Ping pong wunderkind Randy Daytona (Brett DelBuono) competes for a gold medal in the 1988 Olympics, but loses in humiliating fashion to an arrogant East German player (Thomas Lennon). Worse, his father (Robert Patrick) bet heavily on him and is killed on the orders of crime lord Feng (Christopher Walken) when he can't pay his debt. Nineteen years later, the adult Randy (Dan Fogler) is a low-level Reno entertainer until FBI Agent Rodriguez (George Lopez) enlists him in a plan to get to Feng through his underground ping pong tournament.
Writer/director Robert Ben Garant and co-writer Thomas Lennon are two of the three creators of television's Reno 911!, a frequently hilarious parody of police reality shows, so it's a mystery to me how they could make a film so totally bereft of laughs. It's like they've never seen a comedy before and are just making their best guess about how to create one. Perhaps they were replaced by pod people. I don't know. I do know that this film is an abject failure as a comedy. It might have some future use as an instrument of torture, though. The only thing even mildly amusing is the entire cast singing along to Def Leppard during the end credits. And for a film about a ping pong tournament, the competition scenes are almost non-existent.
Tony Award-winner Fogler is likable as Tony, and there are times where you see what a funny guy he could be with the right material, but then the awfulness of the script buries him again. Walken can usually make a film, even a bad one, better simply by his presence, but not this time. Lopez is flat as the FBI agent with James Bond fantasies. DelBuono as the cocky younger Randy, Lennon as the German champion, and James Hong as Randy's trainer fare better despite the material they have to work with. Patrick's scenes are so few that you'll quickly forget he was even in it. Aisha Tyler is too good and too funny to be wasted on the role she has here. Maggie Q is supposed to be the eye candy love interest for the hero, but the poor girl looks so skinny here that I just wanted to offer her some food. Masi Oka of Heroes has a blink and you'll miss it cameo.
How bad is Balls of Fury? There are more laughs to be found in an Ingmar Bergman drama. Dumb comedies can be entertaining. Unfunny ones...well, not so much. Stay far, far away from this one.
[1 out of 5 stars]
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