Written by Hombre Divertido
Balls of Fury is the greatest ping-pong movie ever made!
In a movie that easily could have been called Balls of Glory, Dan Fogler takes the Ferrell role as Randy Daytona, a once great Olympian who became an outcast after an embarrassing incident at the Olympics. Sound familiar? What if I throw in Jim Lampley as the commentator?
Picking up the action years later; Daytona is now a cheap ping-pong lounge act. Yes, you read that right. The FBI recruit him to infiltrate the underground world of Ping Pong in order to help capture the evil Feng (Christopher Walken).
George Lopez plays the FBI agent who takes Daytona to the local Ping Pong guru: Master Wong (James Hong), so that he and his daughter Maggie (Maggie Q) can whip Daytona into shape. Maggie is an amazing ping-pong player, and one might wonder why she was not recruited for the mission instead of Daytona since the FBI obviously had access to her, but this is no movie in which you should be thinking.
Fogler plays the character with more subtle innocence than a Farrell creation, and Hong has some wonderful moments, but the rest of the cast just seems like they owed someone a favor or had a mortgage payment due.
The film actually opens with some solid laughs as it manages to spoof numerous other films, but gets bogged down and repetitive about 40 minutes in. Lopez hangs around waiting to do his Scarface impression, and Walken is wasted. Though it has a ninety-minute run time, the last ten minutes amazingly look as if the writers knew the story was over and that the film was too short, so they came up with a couple more gags.
Like Blades of Glory, this film has some solid laughs, but just not enough to justify the price of admission.
Recommendation: Wait for it to come out on DVD; then wait some more cuz it will be on Comedy Central soon after.
