The first movie I saw upon my return was Balls of Fury, about a short, stubby loser who seeks glory in the world of competitive Ping-Pong. Its like I never left! And while I have nothing against either film aside from the fact that theyre both terrible I do have one request. Can summer please be over now? Balls of Fury is raunchier and somewhat more imaginative than Hot Rod, and it will be must viewing for Christopher Walken completists who have mislaid their special collectors edition DVD of The Country Bears. Mr. Walken plays a super-villain named Feng, who dresses in red brocade and whose passions are Ping-Pong and having people killed with poison darts shot from a blowgun. I will forgo plot summary, since it would take me longer to recount the story than it took the screenwriters, Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, to come up with it. Dan Fogler, looking like the love child of Jack Black and the pornographic-film star Ron Jeremy, plays Randy Daytona, a former Olympic Ping-Pong prodigy who comes out of retirement to avenge his father’s death and help an F.B.I. agent (George Lopez) catch Feng.
Along the way, Balls of Fury shambles through a checklist of lowbrow comedy conventions. Theres borderline-offensive ethnic humor (Asians talk funny! They eat strange food and speak a different language!), a few bouts of queasily self-conscious homophobic humor, and of course a gorgeous babe in short shorts (Maggie Q), who falls in love with our nebbishy, hygienically challenged hero. As usual, the gags and jokes are hit (mainly in the testicles, with Ping-Pong paddles) and miss. Mr. Garant, who directed, does manage to approximate the grungy texture of old Hong Kong action movies, and to execute the Ping-Pong sequences with some panache. But the movie seems to exist mainly so that some critic might say: If you see just one table tennis martial arts parody this year, make it Balls of Fury. Im afraid I can’t go that far.
Directed by Robert Ben Garant; written by Thomas Lennon and Mr. Ben Garant; director of photography, Thomas Ackerman; edited by John Refoua; music by Randy Edelman; production designer, Jeff Knipp; produced by Roger Birnbaum, Gary Barber, Jonathan Glickman and Mr. Lennon; released by Rogue Pictures. Running time: 90 minutes.
