A Ping-Pong Comedy? Get Christopher Walken
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
If nothing else, “Balls of Fury,” a gross, funny, and playfully sentimental new comedy from “Reno 911!” and “The State” creators Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, offers a reminder that punch lines may come and go, but a properly timed torrent of water and accompanying spit-take will remain a thing of beauty forever. The film’s un-taxing pastiche of other familiar gags is as genially low-brow and retro as the revenge-driven kung-fu movies it intermittently satirizes when not otherwise occupied with groin punches, kicks, grabs, sniffs, and chop-stick stabs.
“Try not to think about it,” offers the father of a U.S. Olympic ping-pong phenom as bookmaking Asian gangsters homicidally glare from the stands during the 1988 ping-pong finals in Seoul. But with his father’s life hanging in the balance, young Randy Daytona (Brett DelBuono) chokes, is humiliated by his German opponent Karl Wolfschtagg (Mr. Lennon), and is orphaned by emissaries of Feng (Christopher Walken), the ruthless Triad leader to whom his dad (Robert Patrick) was fatally in debt.
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