MCT—“Welcome to the underbelly of pingpong,” says the sage Chinese master in the latest merrily stupid sports comedy, Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant’s Balls of Fury.
A flagrant steal of the Bruce Lee martial arts classic Enter the Dragon, this goofball farce substitutes table tennis for kung fu.
Dan Fogler makes his segue from stage to screen as Randy Daytona, a ping-pong champion recruited by the FBI.
Fogler, a comic actor in the tradition of John Belushi and Jack Black (slobby, eye-rolling, funny), carries Balls of Fury fairly effortlessly, and Christopher Walken does his shtick as the villainous Feng—a gun-running pingpong obsessive whose wardrobe represents a sartorial mind-meld between latter-day Elvis and the most flamboyant Fu Manchu.
