Review of Balls of Fury (2007) by Erik P — 17 Dec 2009

The good: This is a far better movie than most give it credit.

The bad: The first 22 minutes.

The ugly: I watched this movie to the end, only so I'd be entitled to complain about its opening scenes.

From the beginning of this movie until the beginning of the battle against "The Dragon," the movie tries to both take ping-pong so seriously that it's funny while at the same time, expect the audience to take the plot seriously at just the right times and manages to fail being either funny or emotionally charged in any way, which is sad because it had a very likable cast, all of whom were only cable T.V. stars but a star-studded cast nonetheless.

It opens up with Randy Datona as a child prodigy of table tennis, entering the olympics or some sort of competition made to look like it. Of course, as a sort of spin-off of Dodgeball, they had to push the German stereotype as far as it could go, eventually I came to like the character of the German competitor but it was a long and slow process.

Soon the movie jumps to 19 years later (I think) where we hear a man and parrot singing such a horrible version of Two Tickets to Paradise, that I was hoping he would die on one of those tickets blackout dates. It's followed by an impressive but likely CG performance of Randy doing all sorts of ping-pong tricks and long story short, an FBI agent tells him they need his "special abilities" so the FBI would have an informant in an international ping pong tournament held by some crime boss (even though CIA would be handling an international case). He apparently has been authorized to offer all of the government's resources for his help but is breaking down a few minutes later over how none of the other agents would accept "operation ping pong.".

Soon afterwords, Daytona is introduced to the "greatest ping pong instructor to ever live," an old, blind, Chinese man who refuses to teach non-Chinese students, this is never resolved, he just decides to do it anyways after a few seconds of yelling how he wouldn't. Soon after that, we see his niece playing ping-pong against about 6 other guys while barely moving to hit the balls. It's about as dumb as it sounds.

Having come close already to shutting off the DVD player twice, the absolutely pointless fight scene came in and watching the movie began to actually, physically cause me pain just to watch such a a stupid, ungodly script unfold. Fortunately, this was the worst the movie ever got, I kept watching, wondering if the half-naked girl in the fight was meant to make this scene more bearable or just make everything seem even faker than it already obviously was.

This is followed by an actually, rather decent parody of pretty much all the "Karate Kid" movies or movies like it but I guess I just needed time to recover from the horrible delivery of the script's previous, mediocre humor before I could find anything funny.

As I've already stated, the movie becomes decent somewhere during the match against "The Dragon" although it never presents anything so great that it can justify its weak (to put it lightly) opening and every time I heard the letters "FBI" after they head into South America, it was like nails on a chalkboard to me, knowing they were clearly in the jurisdiction of the CIA and had ample opportunity to switch out agents.