God awful

Rating: 2/10 (23 December 2007)

I can never wrap my head around the careers of Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant. On television, their work is some of the best comedy of the past couple of decades: The State, Viva Variety!, and, their triumph, Comedy Central's Reno 911. But when they write movies, the results are well nigh unwatchable. I had thought in the past that they were just defecating cheap movie scripts so that they could make money and continue producing fine work on television. I mean, The Pacifier, Herbie: Fully Loaded and Night at the Museum smack of the kind of audience-despising material you might expect from smart writers deliberately trying to dumb down their work for some cold hard cash. Add to that the fact that their movie version of Reno 911, which was released early in 2007, was pretty good. But then, later in the year, they made this film. It's a cheesy little comedy, and it has a lot of potential to be decent, if unremarkable, fun. This is their genre, unlike the children's flicks. There's no conceivable reason to hate your audience here, since presumably they'll be pretty close to the same audience that watches Reno 911. Dan Fogler plays a former child prodigy and Olympic table tennis player. Now he's a loser, but he's being recruited by the FBI to infiltrate an underground ping-pong tournament, hosted by an international criminal, played by Christopher Walken. The premise, reminiscent of other recent underground sports comedies like Dodgeball and Beerfest, doesn't have a lot of promise, it's true. But all a comedy really needs is some good jokes, and it'll fly. Or at least you'd think it would. The problem with Balls of Fury isn't exactly its jokes. They're funny enough, for the most part. It's the delivery. The actors have little ability in comic timing (what halfway decent comedic director would willfully hire George Lopez to be in their movie?), and Robert Ben Garant often fails to sell the jokes, even when they are potentially amusing. Even when the comic performances are good, as is the case with Walken and co-writer Thomas Lennon himself, the editing is so poor that the gags almost never hit. It's all quite maddening. Reno 911 is particularly brilliant in its editing. I really don't see how the same people could produce such a laughless comedy. I guess TV is just their medium, but I don't understand why film-making should prove so difficult for them.