Balls of Fury

Making dumb comedies is harder than it looks: for every ‘Dodgeball’ there are dozens of excruciating failures. This ping pong parody of Bruce Lee’s ‘Enter the Dragon’, is a case in point. Nineteen years after a humiliating exit from the 1988 Olympics, washed-up table tennis prodigy Randy Daytona (Dan Fogler) is a cheesy casino novelty act. Then FBI agent Ernie Rodriguez (George Lopez) asks him to infiltrate the lair of arms dealer and ping pong enthusiast Feng (Christopher Walken). So, with the help of blind mentor Mr Wong (James Hong) and his fit young niece, Maggie (Maggie Q, the villainess from ‘Live Free or Die Hard’), Randy enters a secret ‘sudden death’ contest and takes on sundry racial stereotypes. These include his blond Aryan nemesis Karl Wolfschtagg (Tom Lennon). More paunchy than raunchy, Fogler’s Def Leppard fan is a feeble riff on Jack Black’s metal-loving meathead roles. The rest is CGI-assisted ping pong and lame gags about dead pandas, simpering homos and ‘Antiques Roadshow’. Director Robert Ben Garant (‘Reno 911!: Miami’) inflicted this Chinese water torture.