 |
Trailer Stash: Balls of Fury
Christopher Walken as a Chinese crime lord? Yep, you read that right.
By Sara Brady
Icon by Lisa Martin
|
After all the schadenfreude, angst, hair-pulling, and general screaminess that accompanies The Week the Oscar Nominations Come Out, I decided to relax with a movie trailer that promises to be nothing but delightful: Balls of Fury. And do you know why it should be so delightful? Because it features Christopher Walken as a Chinese crime lord.
Christopher Walken. Chinese. Crime lord. You heard me.
A few months ago, Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant, who wrote Balls of Fury (Garant also directed) visited the Premiere offices to show us snippets of the film. The footage they brought was pants-wettingly funny, with Walken doing something along the lines of his old Saturday Night Live routine where he made sexytime to the camera.
But this is not about the movie; it is about the trailer. Which opens with a flaming Ping-Pong ball and Trailer Man intoning, "In the criminal underworld, there is a deadly tournament of champions. Many enter, but only one... survives." I half expect this to be the story of the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. Chung chung. Oh, wait — it's about Christopher Walken! Whose name is Mr. Feng. George Lopez, playing a federal agent... okay, I'm sorry to keep interrupting, but George Lopez? As a federal agent. Was Carlos Mencia unavailable?
Ugh. Anyway, George exposits the Feng is going to make "a major shipment" into the country. He doesn't specify of what, leaving the possibility open that Feng could be importing perfectly legal bootlegs of Fatboy Slim videos. "Only one man," Trailer Man tells us, "has the balls to bring him down."
That man is former child Ping-Pong prodigy Ricky Daytona, played by Tony winner Dan Fogler. I am not making any of this up. Daytona has fallen on hard times and is doing a Ping-Pong show in Vegas for what I can only imagine are less than Celine-sized audiences. George enlists Daytona to compete in Feng's Ping-Pong tournament, and here Garant and Lennon gift Walken with the line, "Ping-Pong. Or, as the Chinese say... Ping-Pong."
The training montage ensues, complete with a stomach-turning moment of Patton Oswalt licking a Ping-Pong trophy. Daytona looks as confounded as I do.
James Wong, who you may recognize from many, many other movies and TV shows in which he plays a wise Asian sage, shows up to be Daytona's Mr. Miyagi, introducing his Ping-Pong prodigy niece. Go ahead, say that last bit three times fast. I'll wait. Daytona makes a crude joke about the niece, played by Mission: Impossible III's quite bendy Maggie Q.
And then there's the traditional smuggle-something-in-your-bum joke, leading me to the sinking suspicion that Balls of Fury might have more in common with Garant and Lennon's humorless flop Let's Go to Prison than with their sharp and fairly hilarious screenplay for Night at the Museum. The presence of one of the Wayans brothers' repertory members, Terry Crews, only reinforces this impression.
The last moment is an uncomfortable non-joke about Daytona killing Miyagi's lucky cricket. Which has nothing do with Ping-Pong or the unfortunate working-for-the-government plot or anything... I feel misled and betrayed.
This is not a very good trailer. But I'm choosing to believe that all of the idiotic gross-out jokes were crammed into the trailer to drag in a puerile but lucrative audience, and that the film itself will include much, much more Walken, and much, much more Ping-Pong. I feel that if Balls of Fury can distinguish itself from the frighteningly similarly named Blades of Glory it might have a chance.
|
