Balls of Fury

2007 sports comedy

Rating: 6/20

Plot: Olympic table tennis failure and Jack Black lookalike Randy Daytona is recruited by an FBI agent to come out of retirement and get himself involved in the dirty underworld of ping pong, specifically with the invite-only and deadly annual tournament that Christopher Walken's character has. The audience scrunches its collective brow and demands to have its money back immediately.

The good: I really enjoyed the scenes in which ping pong was played. During the matches, there was very rarely anything stupid going on, and the special effects involved worked perfectly to create something that looked very real and very exciting. That was about it though. The rest of this Dodgeball/almost-every-kung-fu-movie-plot rip-off stunk. The characters, with the possible exception of James Hong's (the James Hong who was in that Seinfeld episode where they are trying to see Plan Nine from Outer Space but can't get a table at a Chinese restaurant) role as the elderly eccentric teacher character who uses unorthodox methods to educate, aren't interesting, and the plot is just an excuse to get to the next situation that is supposed to be funny. I was in the mood for something stupid and funny, but sadly, I didn't laugh a single time. This, I guess, is what happens when you set out to make a cult classic. For whatever reason (and perhaps unfairly), I blame Will Ferrell for stuff like this.

Here I am watching Balls of Fury: