A rather shockingly enervated treatment of a colorful, willfully silly concept, Balls of Fury disappoints across the board — both to those expecting the bawdy underdog tale of a tubby, make-good loser, and those seeking something a bit more offbeat from its creators, the creative team behind the small screen cable series Reno 911!



The film opens with a preamble which details the back story of 12-year-old ping-pong prodigy Randy Daytona, who's competing in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. After he suffers a crushing loss in the finals to trash-talking German master Karl Wolfschtagg (Thomas Lennon), Randy's father is killed. Nearly two decades later, a grown-up Randy (2005 Tony Award winner Dan Fogler) is retired from competition and performing parlor tricks at a casino buffet stage show when FBI agent Ernie Rodriguez (George Lopez) comes calling. He enlists Daytona to help smoke out his father's killer — a reclusive villain named Feng (Christopher Walken, above) who every several years, for his own amusement, sanctions an underground ping-pong tournament comprised of the best players in the world. Under the tutelage of ping-pong sage and restaurateur Wong (James Hong) and the training expertise of Wong's wildly sexy niece Maggie (Maggie Q), Daytona gains admittance to Feng's tournament, where shrug-inducing antics ensue.

Despite its out-there premise, director Robert Ben Garant delivers an air-quote comedy of awkwardness and an ambling, altogether casual story of familial vengeance masquerading as something wilder. He and co-scripter Lennon have collaborated on a number of screenplays, including last holiday season's extremely lucrative Night at the Museum, but the comedy here feels barely sketched out beyond the cursory setting of scenes. Still, it's not the low-energy treatment that dooms the film, per se, but rather the fact that so many rejoinders and comedic opportunities are left on the table, unexplored. Even Walken, typically a hoot, if even in discrete fashion from whatever movie he's in, can't save this affair; all things considered, he plays his part fairly straight, and in one scene he's very clearly reading from cue cards. For the full review, from Screen International, click here.