Balls of FuryA comic mish-mash  August 29,
2007 12:04:02 PM
VIDEO: Watch the trailer for Balls of Fury.
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An Asian wise man in this film from Reno 911’s Robert Ben Garant says, “Ping-pong is like a fine, well-aged prostitute. She laughs at you when you are naked, but you keep coming back for more.” The movie is a bit like that too. The gags fall flat, Garant lifts from such staples as Enter the Dragon and The Karate Kid, and yet it doesn’t go away. Credit in part Christopher Walken’s evil Feng, a screwy triad boss sponsoring a death-match ping-pong tourney in South America. The FBI enlists fallen table-tennis star Randy Daytona (Dan Fogler) to be its inside man — but the plot ceases to have any meaning as the film disintegrates into a sometimes comic mish-mash of Def Leppard riffs, gay male sex slaves, and George Lopez channeling Tony Montana. Walken and character actor James Hong as a blind, proverb-spouting mentor score all the zingers, a svelte Maggie Q adds sass as sidekick/love interest, and Garant keeps it all bouncing along.
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Taut, but the pieces don't fit
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A fruitcake of a film
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A call to action
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Call the script doc
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Not quite the Bourne franchise
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Full-blown FX
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A sex-gore flop
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Hokey charms and convictions
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More gory pranks
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Skiing in a relentlessly-cut-to-heavy-metal format
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- The perfect fusion of sound and vision
- Daniel Day-Lewis gushes in Paul Thomas Anderson’s punch-drunk epic
- Genre futility
- Loving, but tedious
- “Ephemeral, dangerous, and unfair”
- The deck is stacked
- Reaching for the stars
- Easy jokes? Absolutely
- A middling effort for Hilary Swank
- Waged by amiable actors
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