Thanks to Saturday Night Live, Christopher Walken has reinvented himself as a comedic actor. His skit “More Cowbell” is legendary, and the DVD “Best of Christopher Walken” has been a bestseller. Walken appeared in last year’s Adam Sandler remote control comedy “Click” and was also married to John Travolta in the big screen version of “Hairspray” earlier this year. This week, Walken is back in what might be his strangest role to date in “Balls of Fury.”
The movie centers on Randy Daytona (played by Tony Award winner Dan Fogler), a ping-pong wunderkind who was the star of the 1988 Olympics (not in real life, just in the movie). Daytona’s father places a bet on his son’s championship game, which ends up costing Randy the game and his father’s life. Randy falls from grace and spends the next 19 years doing ping-pong tricks in Reno.
Flash forward to the present, and the FBI is trying to arrest a Chinese crime lord named Feng (played by Christopher Walken). Feng is also the one behind Randy’s father’s death and is a BIG fan of ping-pong. Feng is hosting an invite-only ping-pong tournament, and the feds recruit Randy to come in as his mole to catch Feng and get revenge for the death of his father.
An action-hungry FBI agent (played by George Lopez), a blind ping-pong instructor and his niece (James Hong and Maggie Q.) round out our cast of heroes in this slapstick comedy.
“Balls of Fury” is “Enter the Dragon” and “Hot Shots,” but it doesn’t do as well as either of those two movies. The humor is mostly physical and gets old pretty quickly. Fogler is decent as the failed ping-pong player, and George Lopez is about as funny as can be in his limited role. The big disappointment for me though was Walken. He seemed like he never really understood his Feng character. He plays a Chinese crime lord, but he’s dressed as Gary Oldman in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” And he is not Chinese! Maybe that’s part of the gag, but it’s not very funny. He also offers his lines in a variety of guises, ranging from harsh and guttural to Liberace-esque. The bottom line is that I never thought of him as the bad guy.
The climactic scene is over-the-top and ridiculous, with Feng and Daytona playing a game of do-or-die ping-pong… with no table. It doesn’t make any sense at all.
So should I “go watch it”, “wait for the DVD” or “skip it?”
I’m going with “wait for the DVD”, or maybe even HBO.