Thursday, August 30, 2007

Movie review: Balls of Fury

It's been hard getting through the first 25 years of my life. It's been hard waking up every morning knowing that the greatest and most important story in the history of the world was not being told. Do you know how hard it is to survive in the modern world without a film that explores the complicated and dangerous sport of ping pong, known to some as table tennis? Thank God, I no longer have to go another day with that hanging over my head!

Balls of Fury is our introduction to the world of underground table tennis, which was briefly touched upon in Forrest Gump but never given the proper recognition. It is a glorious story of a boy disgraced at a young age but who finds courage by going undercover for the FBI to bring down an evil Triad leader played by Christopher Walken by infiltrating his play-to-the-death tournament of ping pong and by falling in love with a way-out-of-his-league Asian-American girl who kicks ass at ping pong and kung fu and who looks a lot like the hot Asian chick from Mission: Impossible III, Maggie Q. Phew! What a sentence, and what a story to be told!

In reality,Balls of Fury is an extremely dumb and ludicrous film that never takes itself seriously. There's not much to say... the people who go see this film, like me, are not expecting an award-winning movie, or even a good movie, or even a mediocre movie. We're expecting to laugh at cheap jokes and nothing more, so anything I say here is going to be disregarded. Still, the review must go on...

Balls of Fury has its funny moments, and honestly, though I admit it's one God-awful movie, it is just entertaining enough to last eighty minutes. That being said, director Robert Ben Garant apparently thought that he could just film a bunch of completely random scenes and piece them together at the last second to form what can only be described as a chronological montage. Actually, it looks more like his kids got a hold of the footage, applied the paste they hadn't already eaten to a bunch of cut up reels of film and assembled Balls of Fury. Many of the scenes are so random and so unfunny, you honestly have to scratch your head to figure out why they were filmed in the first place. Surprisingly, people in the audience were laughing non-stop at some of these sequences, even while my buddy and I were trying to understand the joke.

Balls of Fury is made for a special type of audience member, but is a good film to watch with a big group of people while drunk. Very, very drunk. I don't feel like I wasted my time watching the movie, yet at the same time it is a complete waste of time. And that is the logic of Balls of Fury. Good night.

No comments: