Balls of Fury

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Essentially Enter The Dragon but with ping-pong instead of martial arts (and nowhere near as funny as that sounds), Balls of Fury's plot centres on a washed-up former pong champion, Randy Daytona (Fogler), who is recruited by the FBI to infiltrate the hierarchy of the triads in a table tennis tournament. The tournament is being held by their pong-obsessed leader Feng (Walken) - who killed his father years earlier. Using up all of its decent jokes within the first 20 minutes, Balls of Fury soon stops being amusing and quickly starts to grate. The cast struggle to maintain what is essentially a one-joke setup for the entire running time, while performances range from bearable (Fogler) to embarrassing (Walken). In fairness, they're merely the ones who have to front this sorry excuse for a parody, while the writing team (who brought us The Pacifier and Night at the Museum) get to hide behind their crayon-stained scripts. Trying desperately to emulate Dodgeball but ending up much nearer Beerfest territory, there are a couple of nice visual gags (a dinner patron has a heart-attack); but events soon descend into old-man-cursing-for-laughs territory, and then stay there in a monotonous loop. You could argue that this is supposed to be stupid, and yes, it is - thus, expectations are sufficiently lowered for some crass hilarity that never happens. While hardly a premise with huge amounts of comedic promise, it should nevertheless have delivered a lot more consistent laughs, purely on the basis that people getting hit in sensitive areas with plastic balls is funny. Instead, we're subjected to derivative supporting players (an egotistical German.. there's a stretch), who might have one funny line, only to proceed to rape it far beyond a mild chuckle. Enjoyment solely depends on how stupid a mood you are in; so if you have recently been subjected to a lobotomy, or know someone who has, your post-Christmas cinema trip has just been rubber-stamped.

Details: USA / 90mins (12A)