Balls of Fury: Critic Reviews

It's the kind of comedy that finds Asian people hi-lar-ious because they're...Asian. (Are you laughing yet?)

Balls of Fury is raunchier and somewhat more imaginative than Hot Rod, and it will be must viewing for Christopher Walken completists.

This comedy raises the odd laugh, largely from an absurd appearance by Christopher Walken as a sinister martial-arts kingpin villain.

The gags are either obvious, lame, ineptly timed or repeated so many times as to render them devoid of humor.

Nothing original, nothing outrageous.

Balls of Fury also scores points, so to speak, for coming up with its own sports context. Talladega Nights had NASCAR. Blades of Glory had the world of figure skating. Ping-Pong has . . . rec rooms?

[Question:] Balls of Fury is a movie about: a. A former table-tennis prodigy enlisted by the FBI to infiltrate the underground Ping-Pong tournament of a legendary Chinese criminal. b. Suppository jokes. c. Nothing worth discussing.

Lennon, Garant and Fogler are masters of the prolonged punch line, extending a joke so far that it hits funny, whizzes into the stands, then bounces back. The same, come to think of it, could be said for their movie.

Don't expect me to explain the rules and purposes of the tournament, if it has any. I was preoccupied with observing the sheer absurdity of everything on the screen...

This is pretty thin soup, but the players are spirited and the jokes generally offbeat.

While Balls of Fury is slightly more sophisticated in its comic strategies, 'slightly' remains the operative word.

It's schlocky and tasteless but also good-natured and harmless, and the people who come out to see it will get just what they want: 90 minutes of freewheeling, switch-off-your-brain laughs.

Balls of Fury is a stupid movie that's not quite stupid enough, or at least not quite funny enough.

Relentlessly silly in spoofing martial-arts movie conventions, Balls of Fury has roughly enough laughs for a first-class trailer but wheezes, gasps and finally goes flat through much of its 90 minutes.

Christopher Walken does not actually show up in Asian drag until halfway through Balls of Fury -- not enough to salvage this mostly unfunny, extremely silly pingpong comedy.

Ben Garant fumbles the formula he's mocking, denying us the spectacular and hilarious matches that the story demands.

The movie's big lug of a lead, Dan Fogler...could be dismissed as a poor man's Jack Black.

It may look episodic and disgracefully low-budget in places, but there's also a theatrical quality in the way scenes are blocked, and punch lines delivered.

Ultimately, it's a hollow enterprise, all ping and no pong. It doesn't bounce; it splats.

It's the killer pingpong action that ultimately keeps Balls afloat.

Goodness, gracious, there's no greatness in Balls of Fury, a lifeless pingpong comedy that ricochets from one flat gag to the next. The only novelty it can boast of is that it's a sports spoof without Will Ferrell.

[Is it] good? Heavens, no. But it has its seedy charms.