Balls of Fury

Review By: Zak Santucci
ZakSantucci@TheCinemaSource.com

Whoa is me, who continues to watch more lazily written, hastily slapped together, all-around shitty comedies. I cross my fingers each time, hoping that Hollywood can put together a brain-dead comedy that delivers cheap laughs with nut-shots and fart jokes galore. Now they can’t even do those right.

Balls of Fury is the charming tale of Ping Pong prodigy Randy Daytona (Dan Fogler) who had to suffer his father’s death and the loss of a gold medal in the Olympics in a gambling incident, thereby guaranteeing his estrangement from the sport he loves. Now disgraced into doing trick shows at a seedy club, Daytona is confronted by FBI agent Ernie Rodriguez (bought to you by the comedy stylings of George Lopez) to participate undercover in an underground Ping Pong tournament run by a vicious arms dealer.

Equipped with an arsenal of Def Leppard t-shirts, Daytona sets off to visit the legendary trainer Master Wong (James Hong) and his beautiful niece, Maggie (Maggie Q). They eventually improve his skills, (although you could have fooled me, the whole training exercise was a series of pratfalls indicating that Daytona can’t even stand-up straight let alone hit a Ping Pong ball), and Daytona sets off to fight the evil Feng. Unfortunately, Feng is played by the painfully over-exposed Christopher Walken.

Here we are again, confronted with the, “completely unserious sport comedy starring vehicle of the last couple of years.” Balls of Fury has the prestigious honor of being ranked among such comedy classics as Blades of Glory, Talladega Nights, Kicking & Screaming, Rebound, Bad News Bears (remake), Nacho Libre, The Longest Yard, Who’s Your Caddy?, Mr. 3000, and Beer League. Even better, it gets to stand right at the bottom of the worst of these I’ve seen. (I never saw Rebound or Who’s Your Caddy? though, so there’s still hope.) I continually found myself asking “Why?!?” mostly to questions about plot. I was forced to pay attention to this meaningless plot because nobody thought to put in funny jokes to distract me. In fact, I was forced to ignore the jokes for the most part, because they were so embarrassingly unfunny. I found Daytona’s obsession with Def Leppard a bit of humorous and laughed once when during the underground tournament introduction, someone dramatically crushes a Ping Pong ball in his hand to show off his badass-ness and strength. I was hoping for more jokes embracing the ridiculousness of Ping Pong, when in fact that was one of the only things played straight as we were bombarded with poorly set-up slapstick and ...