Review: Balls of Fury

Rated PG-13 | 90 mins

If there is a single thing that Balls of Fury does extremely well, it’s that the film proves that good ideas for movies do not necessarily translate into good movies themselves. The trailer for Balls of Fury showed that the flick had promise: ridiculous table-tennis matches, Christopher Walken acting as outrageously as his muscles could muster, instances in which the term “sudden death” literally meant sudden death. But in the feature, all of these clever moments never amount to comedy of greater weight; they merely exist as fragments that could’ve been part of a decent movie. In essence, director Bob Odenkirk and screenwriters Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant never bother to realize that corny lines and goofy characters only prove truly amusing when they are supported by a humorous background story. Balls of Fury certainly lacks any kind of comedic meat, existing for the fruitlessly unfunny purpose of being random. Not even Walken himself can save the floundering material; due to the absence of a personality behind his character, the actor is left to sit on the sidelines and play the same stereotype that he has in countless other bad films. Only during the creatively-staged final ping-pong match did I feel as though Balls of Fury was coming into its own and, by that time, it was far too late for the picture to redeem itself. Avoid this embarrassment and its insipid antics at all costs.