Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
9/3/07
OK, I'm going to make this
easy for you. Close your eyes (I'm not sure how you're going to keep
reading this once you've done that, but I can't solve all your problems...)
and picture the Bruce Lee classic Enter the Dragon and the thousands
of ripoffs that have followed it. Secluded island, the greatest martial
artists from around the world gathered for a tournament run by a crime
lord against whom Our Hero lusts for revenge. Got it? OK, take
the words “martial artists” out of that sentence and substitute “Ping Pong
Players”. Does the thought make you smile? If so, read on.
If not, Balls of Fury, the new comedy from Reno 911! masterminds
Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon likely isn't for you. Using the
same formula to bust the bubble of martial arts machismo with which Reno
attacks the manliness of police work, Balls is best appreciated
if you know your action movie cliches inside and out. Guilty as charged:
I had a ball.
12 year-old Randy Daytona
(Brett DelBuono) is the American star of the 1988 Olympics. He's
cruising toward a Gold Medal in Ping Pong, and his Dad (Robert Patrick)
can't resist betting on the seemingly inevitable victory. So when
Randy chokes against East German Karl Wolfschtagg (Thomas Lennon), his
father is murdered by a Triad crime lord named Feng. Fast-forward
to 2007 and adult Randy (Dan Fogler) is ping ponging his way through a
miserable Reno lounge act when he's approached by Agent Ernie Rodriguez
(George Lopez). It seems that Feng is bringing together the world's
greatest Ping Pong players to compete in a secret tournament, and
the FBI wants Randy to play his way in. But first, he'll need to
get his game back, for which Rodriguez takes him to Master Wong (James
Hong), the blind Ping Pong Master who taught Feng everything he knows.
Under the tutelage of Wong and his daughter Maggie (Maggie Q), Randy's
read for action. A victory over Chinatown's most fearsome player
secures an invitation to the secret compound of Feng (Christopher Walken),
whose tournament gives new meaning to Sudden Death.
Most genre movies are constructed
by taking a familiar skeleton we've all seen before and inserting a few
specifics (like different character names and, optionally, original dialog)
into the blanks. What makes Balls of Fury so funny is that
it sees blanks where there shouldn't be any and runs the same Enter
the Dragon playbook with the least macho sport that's played without
skates. It's also smart enough not to suggest that we're watching
a parallel universe where Ping Pong has taken the place of martial arts,
but instead that we're watching people who've constructed their own subculture
that takes paddles and balls WAY too seriously. I loved the sequence
where Randy defends Wong's honor (he's violated The Code by teaching Ping
Pong to a Westerner) by facing the feared player The Dragon. Wong
tells him that the Ping Pong dens of Chinatown are “...where fortunes are
won and lost. Of course, I am exaggerating,” and indeed the bets
placed happen mostly with dollar bills. And The Dragon herself takes
a moment to put her Dora the Explorer backpack in her locker before
challenging Randy. Feng's got an ill-gotten fortune, so why not spend
it on pitting the world's best players against each other in Ping Pong
matches to the death, complete with secret lair where players wear special
electrically rigged suits? Randy Edelman's perfectly mock-heroic
score does a great job keeping the thrills coming... even when there aren't
any.
Other than the nifty satire
of genre cliches, the plentiful jokes are as sophomoric as they are hilarious.
As on Reno: 911!, the humor is too good-hearted to offend:
Garant and Lennon really get the way everybody's a little lamer than they
wish they were, and their comedies of people refusing to give in to that
fact strike me as really humanist. The movie's biggest problem is
the same faced by most comedies these days: even though the plot
is like an arrow shooting directly toward a Randy/Wolfschtagg rematch followed
by a final battle with Feng, it can't decide which of these, or even a
couple other climaxes it throws in for good measure, to go with, and the
ending keeps starting, stopping, and sputtering out as it limps toward
a conclusion that should have sealed the deal. The 90-minute film
could have done a lot more with its' rogue's gallery of contestants and
henchmen, and the end credits are filled with clips from deleted scenes
that would seem to do that.
Asked to deliver a performance
pitched somewhere between Jack Black and Sam Kinison, Tony-winner Fogler
(The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) is surprisingly effective,
accessible and funny, at least when the screenplay's not forcing him to
lip sync and air guitar to Def Leppard. Clad in a variety of outrageous
costumes and hairstyles, Walken is Walken, and this is one of those perfectly
selected roles in which that alone is simply hilarious. Best of all
is Hong (he'll always be Big Trouble in Little China's Lo Pan to
me), who hilariously turns the Blind Asian Master stereotype he's played
more than once himself on its' ear. His speech about how “Ping Pong
is like an old prostitute” is a show-stopper, and while blind man slapstick
isn't the most sophisticated or enlightened form of humor, he does it really
well. Asked to play straightman, Lopez isn't bad: ditto Maggie
Q, whose job is to fill the “love interest with nothing to do” role these
movies always have. Lennon is a hoot as the Communist Superman Wolfschtagg,
it's just a shame he doesn't get more to do. And there are lots of
game performances in small roles, including Patrick and Aisha Tyler, who's
delightful as Feng's poison dart-blowing henchwoman Mahogany.
Balls of Fury nails
the harder-than-you'd-think trick of being both smarter and dumber than
you'd expect. The better you know the Enter the Dragon subgenre
(for instance, the fact that Feng tempts all his guests with their choice
from his collection of male sex slaves is just a cheap gay joke if you
don't, but a wonderful comment on the nature of damsels in distress if
you do), the better you'll like it. And it doesn't hurt to think
the words “Ping Pong” are inherently funny, either. Guilty as charged. |
