Balls of Fury

Review by Jason Donner

After the never-ending line of yumminess that the Summer of 2007 has been, a movie like Balls of Fury is like a kick into the testicular area. Not just a little kick, mind you, but a very powerful kick delivered by someone wearing spiky shoes with a razorblade in the toe.

For a movie that looks to be so outrageous and daring, Balls of Fury is a vanilla movie that rarely even comes close to the distant suburbs of what I would call outrageous. This Dodgeball wannabe riding on the heels of its betters is so devoid of personality and any real laughter beyond the fact that its title has the word "balls" in it, that it will be destined to fade into the sands of obscurity... deservingly forgotten as a bland movie made by hack writers who somehow managed to get a top-notch cast to suck.

Balls of Fury features the questionable talents of one Dan Folger - some sort of low-rent Jack Black - as a former ping pong champion who blew the 1988 Olympics and has been embarrassed by it ever since by those who watched his disastrous match. This begs the question, who the hell are these people who berate him and where the hell do they get off? Have they been to the Olympics at age twelve? No? Then shut up!

Oh, and the Chinese triads killed his dad at the Olympics too so he's kind of bummed about that too.

Several years later, this ping-pong champion (notice how I can't remember his name and am not even bothering to look it up?) meets George Lopez who plays an FBI agent who uses him to infiltrate the hideout of a gangster played by Christopher Walken who is holding a life or death ping pong match and, you know, that's really all the synopsis I can stand.

You'd think that this movie would have practically written itself and I really wish it would have because then it would have skipped the actual writers who wrote it. This movie is pure butt. Not just regular butt, this is Borat's agent's butt. It's that bad.

There is nothing... nothing that is remotely surprising about this movie. It's a parody (I'm assuming) of Enter the Dragon so if you've seen that movie you've pretty much gotten the gist and the humor of this movie seems to have all been used up when the writers came up with the title.

Needless to say, it's not good but thankfully it's been made forgettable enough that you loose all memory of it about the time that the credits start to roll. For the life of me, I can't even remember how the thing ends.  That's how little impact this terrible movie has made on me.