Balls Of Fury Download
Ceola Roefaro
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Bearing the legacy of its predecessors, Leverage XFS coverstock technology is built to dominate a modern environment. The new modifications made to Leverage technology digs in the oil, yet provides slightly more length and energy retention than the Jackal Ambush. This allows for more down lane motion and added versatility. This Leverage XFS creates a controllable, benchmark shape for high concentrations of oil.
The Affliction V2 core is the strongest symmetrical core used by MOTIV Bowling. The fast spinning, low RG of the Affliction V2 gives the Raptor Fury strength in the mid lane and control. The high differential of .055 means that the Raptor Fury has incredible flare potential. Many bowlers look primarily to asymmetrical bowling balls for heavy oil. However, the versatility of a symmetrical core can be an advantage due to the outstanding continuation produced.
Dan Fogler is the star, playing Randy Daytona who, in his youth, was a Ping-Pong phenom, but has been reduced in his 20s to working as a lounge act in Vegas, bouncing the ball off a board while flanked by two babes. That kind of lounge entertainment reminds me of an annual banquet of the Chicago Newspaper
Reporters Association, at which the entertainment consisted of a man who came onstage with 12 of those paddles that have a bouncing ball attached with a rubber band, kept all 12 balls going at once, and then, one by one, got all 12 in his mouth.
Daytona, now grown pudgy and in the early stages of a Curly Howard hairstyle, is discovered in Vegas by Ernie Rodriguez (George Lopez), an FBI agent who wants him to get back into training so he can compete undercover in an illegal global Ping-Pong and martial-arts tournament run by the evil criminal weapons dealer Mr. Feng (Christopher Walken). Walken plays the role with makeup that makes him look Asian, and clothes that look recycled from the wallpaper in a Chinese restaurant. Back in the days of Charlie Chan, Asians were rightfully offended when Caucasian actors portrayed them, but I doubt there is an Asian alive who will begrudge Walken this particular role.
Let's start the review with a shout-out to Jack Black's lawyer. Hey, does your client know Dan Fogler, the star of this punning pingpong parody, is stealing Jack's shtick, right down to the heavy metal-Def Leppard air-guitar solo?
He became "the golden boy who couldn't even bronze," reduced to earning a living doing a pingpong stage act in Reno. Until, that is, an F.B.I. agent (George Lopez impersonating Al Pacino in "Scarface") recruits Randy to win his way into the underground tourney of a villain named Feng so that the Feds can bust up Feng's empire.
There's the great Jason Scott Lee, so promising way back when he played Bruce Lee in "Dragon," reduced to a bit part as an irritable pingpong player who has to translate for a new "Dragon," a bad-sport 10-year old whom Randy must beat to get Feng's attention. Their match, all childish pouts and trash-talk (in Chinese), is the funniest bit in the movie.
Until Christopher Walken shows up. He's done this sort of goof before, but here, he allows the ham to take over. He giggles. He does little "takes" that are cut into the middle of lesser actors' scenes.
But co-writer/director Ben Garant fumbles the formula he's mocking, denying us the spectacular and hilarious matches that the story demands. It's only funny the first few times he uses "Matrix" "bullet-time" effects to stop the pingpong balls in mid-flight.
With a PG-13 rating, this was never going to be as offensive as it needed to be in order to work in today's comedy universe. The only people offended should be Hong, Lee and Maggie Q, all of whom deserve careers that allow them to turn down any crummy comedy that lives or dies by the ping pong puns in its title.
The film stars Dan Fogler, the latest and least of this summer's chubberific leading dweebs. He's not a bad actor; Fogler won a Tony for his work in "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," a play whose very title will forever prevent me from checking it out. But his role here as disgraced former Pingpong prodigy Randy Daytona doesn't give Fogler much to do beside act insecure and whack a lot of balls.
The "Reno 911"/"Pacifier"/"Night at the Museum" guys who wrote "Fury," Thomas Lennon and director Robert Ben Garant, do give Fogler a nicely played scene with a male concubine (Diedrich Bader). But since it's the 17,000th sequence we've seen this year that doesn't know whether to be gay-friendly or homophobic, it just kind of cancels itself out.
Back story is, as a kid, Randy barely lost the '88 Seoul Olympics to cartoon German creep Karl Wolfschtagg (Lennon). This resulted in international humiliation and Randy's dad getting killed by triad bookies. Many years later, incompetent federal agent Rodriguez (an uncharacteristically unfunny George Lopez) ropes adult loser Randy into getting back in shape so he'll be invited to the underground Pingpong tournament sponsored by Feng, the mysterious criminal mastermind who had the elder Daytona whacked.
At this point, some humor finally gets under way. Despite some horrific ethnic humor directed his way, James Hong is often a scream as the blind Pingpong master (!) who gets clod/grasshopper Randy's game back up. Maggie Q does spunky, unlikely love-interest duty, and while it's not much of a part, she wears very little in it. Aisha Tyler emphasizes the assets, too, and actually strikes a few funny and menacing poses as a blowgun-wielding henchwoman.
And when, at his heavily guarded jungle compound and competition arena, Feng's identity is finally revealed. ... Aw hell, even if you don't already know it's Christopher Walken, why else would you go to this mediocre comedy if you couldn't count on watching him in a silly hairdo and silk robes, putting a unique, eccentric spin on every villainous line and move?
Balls of Fury is the latest entrant in what has so far been a subpar subgenre, the can-you-believe-grown-men-are-doing-that sports parody pioneered by movies such as Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story and Blades of Glory. It's a subgenre that doesn't look to have much in the way of legs, though I hope it survives long enough for me to sell a few scripts I've been working on: Bad Milton (the story of a badminton champion with anger management issues--I'm thinking Sandler, obviously); Harlem Shuffle (in which the Wayons brothers pose as senior citizens to win the National Shuffleboard Championship and save their grandma's rest home); and Kickball ('nuff said).
Until these projects are greenlighted, however, Balls of Fury is the best we have. Sadly, "best" is not a word you will see again in this review. A sendup of the martial arts classic Enter the Dragon--because, you see, Chinese people do kung fu and play ping pong--Balls of Fury was written by "Reno 911!" creators Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant and directed by the latter. Tony-award winner Dan Fogler ("The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee"), who is evidently a cheaper and less discerning hire than Jack Black, stars as Randy Daytona, a former table-tennis prodigy whose loss in the finals of the 1988 Seoul Olympics resulted in his father being killed by mobsters. (No, seriously, stop laughing. Let me finish.)
Now in his thirties, Randy does a second-rate show at a third-rate Reno casino, where he is introduced by a cockatiel--that is, until an FBI agent (George Lopez) approaches him and asks him to infiltrate a to-the-death ping-pong tournament hosted by the secretive and diabolical Mr. Feng (Christopher Walken). You can pretty much imagine how the story plays out from there, and in all likelihood it will be better in the imagining than it is in the viewing. There are an elderly ping-pong guru (James Hong) and an improbably hot love interest (Maggie Q). The Asian characters do things like talk funny and eat food with chop sticks that were just up someone's nose. A joke about male sex slaves that is actually pretty funny at first quickly descends into mincing caricature. Much hilarity is found in the coincidence that "balls" is also a word for "testicles"; those belonging to Randy are punched repeatedly, to diminishing comic effect.
Lennon and Garant are evidently aiming for the madcap parody style pioneered by Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers, but they never achieve the joke density needed to pull it off. The entire foundation of the Airplane! /Naked Gun/Scary Movie approach to comedy is the theory that quantity trumps quality-- that if you cram in a dozen gags a minute, it won't matter if the audience laughs at only a fraction of them. Balls of Fury, by contrast, is strangely lax, with long stretches of comic dead air between its would-be howlers. It's one thing not to be terribly funny; it's another to look like you're not even trying.
Which is a shame, because even as veterans like Walken, Hong, and Lopez sleepwalk through their roles, Fogler clearly is trying. A shaggy mass of hair and body fat--he resembles a hairball that has reached maturity--he makes the most of some fairly lame material, alternating between an endearing sweetness (usually when he's about to be hit in the balls) and heavy-metal scene chewing (his occasional capering to Def Leppard and his concluding rendition of "Pour Some Sugar on Me" are the most alive the movie ever gets). Put this guy in a Judd Apatow movie and he'd likely soar; in this one, it's all he can do to stay above water. Fogler does have several more film roles in the pipeline (Good Luck Chuck, Fanboys, Kids in America). One can only hope they have the sense to use him as more than a genital punching bag.