August 22, 2008
For those of us who grew up in the West, ping-pong occupies a place somewhere below darts and above foosball and seems fit mostly for suburban basements and the rec-rooms of rehab centers. It is the kind of sport that causes us to use our hands to make air quotation marks when we use the term “sport” to refer to it.
But, of course, these perceptions are cultural. Soccer, or football, which people across huge parts of the world follow like a religion (the kind where attendance is not falling off and you can gamble on the outcome of the service) barely registers a blip on the radar in North America compared to other major league sports and is most enthusiastically enjoyed by pubescent teens, most likely because all of that endless running back and forth over a mile-long field is a needed distraction from the raging hormones that would otherwise win the day. Baseball, referred to as America’s national past-time, likewise is called rounders (or a form close enough to it is) in Britain and it really isn’t taken seriously outside the schoolyard.
And so it is with ping-pong. While we in the West might think little of the game, with a ping-pong table serving as a convenient shelf for a pack-rat’s junk in a cluttered basement, it is the national sport in China and is popular throughout much of East Asia (though this popularity doesn’t seem to have spread to Bangkok, where “ping-pong” carries an entirely different connotation altogether). So, “Balls of Fury” is not absurd because it treats ping-pong as a sport of consequence. In almost every other respect, however, “Balls of Fury” is completely absurd.
The central character is Randy Dayton (Dan Fogler), a table-tennis prodigy at the age of 12, who loses a showdown in the ’88 Olympics, which were actually the first games to feature ping-pong as an official sport – one nod to reality from the film-makers. He loses to Karl Wolfschtagg who, as you can no doubt ascertain from the name, is a crazed East German stereotype. (Incidentally, this character is played by the film’s co-writer Tom Lennon, making “Balls of Fury” the first movie to my knowledge to be co-written by someone playing an ethnic stereotype.)
Randy’s loss is bad news for his degenerate gambler of a father (Robert Patrick of “Terminator 2”) who bet heavily on the game with the Chinese triad, is unable to make good on the debt and is killed so quickly that neither the audience nor his own son really seems to give too much of a hoot about him after that; when Randy delivers the line “You killed my father” later in the movie, those words could have been replaced by “I was saving that doughnut” and have had the same emotional impact. The man who did the dirty on his father, a criminal mastermind called “Feng” played by Christopher Walken, is the film’s main villain and this no-expense-outlaid setup “makes it personal”.
Knowing Randy’s history with Feng, an FBI agent looking to break into a secret ping-pong tournament that Feng is holding, and also somehow disband an illegal gun-running ring, (or was it a panda-smuggling operation, or a gigolo circuit? This is the kind of movie where such details fade from memory as soon as you learn them) and of course he wants Randy to serve as his ticket into this criminal underworld by playing ping-pong till he’s so good that no underground ping-pong championship would be worth the price of the paddles without him.
When digesting this utterly ludicrous plot, it helps if you’ve seen “Enter the Dragon”, and recognize that all major plot points derive from that film (the title of course is a play on another Bruce Lee film “Fists of Fury”). Robert Ben Garant who wrote and directed the film, admitted as much to KungFuMagazine.com, saying film-makers “took all the kung fu out of a kung fu movie and replaced it with ping-pong”.
And whether or not “The Karate Kid” is considered by anyone to be a classic or even a part of the Kung Fu genre, it too is parodied here, with James Hong (an accomplished character actor, though I recognized him immediately as the unhelpful host in the classic “Seinfeld” Chinese restaurant episode. Cartwright! Cartwright!) in the Mister Miyagi role as “Blind Master Wong”, passing on the secrets of ping pong and acting as the foil for about five more gags involving blindness than would have been advisable.
The makers of this one seemed to have been operating on a few basics. They liked kung fu movies, rock and roll and attractive Asian women (they would, no doubt, feel at home among the ex-pat population of Bangkok). The plot and a couple of rocking interludes involving ‘80s rock band, and suspected “This is Spinal Tap” inspiration, Def Leppard, take care of the first two. Maggie Q, who plays Wong’s niece and Randy’s romantic interest in an unbelievable development that comes out of the clear blue sky, takes care of the third. She provides the movie’s main Kung Fu scene and also makes the best use out of ping-pong’s infamous short-shorts, last seen on the big screen in the opening scenes of the “Borat” movie.
And there’s a conclusion to all of this that involves a ping-pong tournament, male sex slaves, a panda and Christopher Walken in what might have been an offensive portrayal of a Chinese man, had it not been placed in this absurd context. It is the film’s sheer absurdity, and general good natured feel that puts it in the company of movies like “Death Race 2000” (thought that was a better “B”), where to critique it too heavily for its shortcomings seems to miss the entire point and spoil the fun.
Noel, Bangkok
