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*There are spoilers in this review.*
Balls of Fury is a 2007 film about the former greatest ping pong player in the world, Randy Daytona, who is sent on a mission to stop the evil Feng's tournament to the death.
From a movie called "Balls of Fury", I can't say that this movie being bad is a disappointment because its core concept is lackluster while the film being as bad as you would expect. This is the same main problem other film failures like It's Pat and Accepted had (though I'll have to save up my feelings for those movies for their respective reviews): a wacky premise followed by a couple of sub-plots stumbling around the movie in a vain attempt to try to make the movie taken more seriously. However, this movie is called "Balls of Fury", I think any people who wanted a serious sports movie have exited the theater ten minutes in.
Often times, the ridiculous main plot, which focuses more on comedy, and the two subplots, which focus more on action and romance, intertwine with each other and it just becomes both over-dramatic and unfunny at the same time, though each plot still fails to achieve comedy, romance or action all on their own. For example, the finals match to the death with Randy Daytona against his love interest. Randy doesn't want her to die, so he throws the match by making it so she hits the ball unintentionally and Randy doesn't hit it back. However, this is both played for laughs and being taken seriously, resulting in the audience being confused whether to laugh, cry, or stare in awe at the scene before them, and the audience ends up painfully bored.
Many of the jokes in this movie, while not being offensive, miss far too much and are just very lowbrow. Balls of Fury just tries to appeal specifically to teenage audiences, what with gay jokes and the constant stream of "Oh Crap!"s in the dialogue, but any teenager with an I.Q. of over 30 will get very bored of this movie's ridiculous premise very fast.
Randy Daytona is supposed to make the target empathize with him, because the target audience would know how he feels. Instead he comes off as an unfunny frat-boy with an annoyingly loud voice. Christopher Walken and George Lopez did surprisingly good jobs with their acting as Feng and Rodriguez, respectively, but just two people with good acting isn't worth the price of the DVD.
Unless you really like sports movies, action, and romance in one movie, I'm not guaranteeing that you will enjoy this movie. There are so many other better sports movies out there, and I recommend you watch those instead.
3/10
