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Amidst Christopher Walken’s many film credits, I
doubt that the latest, the uproarious but uneven Balls of Fury, will be cited in
Walken’s obituary, but it is a prime example of how an actor who
fearlessly goes out on a limb can make a sow’s ear into at least a
passable knockoff handbag. Walken plays the despicable Master Feng, a fashionista
madman who runs an underground pingpong tournament in Central America.
Players from around the world come to deliver their steroid- or
martial-arts-fueled moves as they
crush pingpong balls with a degree of
intensity that’s usually reserved for weightlifting competitions or
high-stakes mah-jongg tournaments. Though the penalty for losing is death,
it’s the rush of competition that these players are after. Dropped
into the middle of all of this is Randy Daytona (Dan Fogler), a former U.S.
champ who embarrassed himself in the 1988 Olympics
and has been reduced
to displaying his paddle prowess in a cheap act in Reno. Dayton gets a shot
at redemption when FBI agent Ernie Rodriguez (George Lopez) recruits him to
infiltrate Feng’s tournament. As written by Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant, the script
is much like a promising racehorse that fades in the home stretch. Despite
an effective cast of oddball players, the film begins to wear thin at about
the one-hour mark, even with Walken dispensing some killer lines with his
trademark deadpan delivery. The final showdown between Daytona and Feng, paddling
it out on a suspension bridge, is a hoot but by the time we get there far
too many pratfalls have been done and far too many jokes have been beaten
like a dead horse. The bottom line is that Balls
of Fury starts out smokin’ but winds
up snuffed out in the end.
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2007.
