'Balls of Fury' not as funny as the trailer

Rating: 6/10 (29 August 2007)

Have you ever gone to see a movie you've been looking forward to for a long time only to find out that all the best scenes have already been spoiled for you? Usually when this happens it's because of some overzealous friend who can't help but reveal every joke or plot detail beforehand. I was disappointed by the new comedy, "Balls of Fury," not because it's a bad movie, but rather because all the best scenes had been given away by the trailer. Judging the trailer alone, which is hilarious, one would hope that "Balls of Fury" would turn out to be one of the funniest movies in years. Alas, it just wasn't meant to be.
"Balls of Fury" is another one of those sports comedies like "Blades of Glory" in which a once disgraced athlete has to prove he's still got the talent to compete. The only difference this time around is that the sport is Ping-Pong, a game just about everyone has played but few take seriously. One of the funnier aspects of "Balls of Fury" is how everyone in the film takes Ping-Pong not only seriously, but deadly seriously. When a character asks "what part of sudden death didn't you understand," he means business.
The plot is absurd but that's OK, I guess, because nobody goes to these kinds of films for a coherent plot. The story goes something like this: a kid named Randy Daytona (Dan Fogler) loses a national Ping-Ping tournament after having become a phenomenon and a superstar. Never recovering from that loss, Randy grows up, gains a lot of weight, and works at a bad job in Reno, Nevada. When FBI agent Rodriguez (George Lopez) shows up he recruits Randy on a dangerous mission to find Feng (Christopher Walken), a Ping-Pong enthusiast who runs a secret and criminal underworld of tournaments where people are held against their will. Before he goes off to compete in one of Feng's Ping-Pong tournaments Randy must first receive training from Wong (James Hong), a blind Chinese man who has trained some of the best Ping-Pong players in the world. If it sounds like you've heard this basic story before, it's because you have. You can more or less figure out the rest from here.
The funniest scenes involve the blind man (he practically steals the movie) as well as the Christopher Walken character. The casting of Walken as a Chinese man who likes to wear outlandish outfits might seem a bit odd but it nevertheless works. I don't think anyone else could have pulled it off except him. Walken has a way of delivering his lines in a deadpan manner that makes them seem all the more funny. It's clear that he had a good time with this role.
What's disappointing about the movie, however, is that it's really not as funny as it sounds. The problem is that there are only about three or four kinds of jokes that are simply repeated over and over again until they're not funny anymore. We get at least six scenes of the main character getting punched or kicked in the crotch. We get a lot of homophobic humor (this seems to be happening a lot lately in comedies) involving feminine men wearing short shorts. We get a lot of scenes where the blind man is looking in the wrong direction or falling because he can't see in front of him. Last but not least, we get too much ethnic humor concerning the Chinese because apparently Asians are very funny to Western audiences even when they're not doing anything funny. This is all harmless, dumb fun, I suppose, but this kind of humor seems to be aimed primarily at twelve year old boys.
The trailer for "Balls of Fury" is much funnier than the movie itself because it contains all the best scenes and edited in such way as to create good comedic timing. When you've already seen the best scenes then much of the fun is spoiled. Even though I found "Balls of Fury" to be rather flat and derivative, I still watched it with a smile on my face. I suspect most people will enjoy it but I doubt they will remember it for very long.