Balls of Fury

Balls of Fury is a 2007 American sports comedy film directed by Robert Ben Garant, who co-wrote it with Thomas Lennon. It stars Dan Fogler, George Lopez, Christopher Walken, and Maggie Q. The film was released in the United States on August 29, 2007.

Balls of Fury
Theatrical poster
Directed byRobert Ben Garant
Produced by
Written by
  • Thomas Lennon
  • Robert Ben Garant
Starring
Music byRandy Edelman
CinematographyThomas E. Ackerman
Edited byJohn Refoua
Production
company
Distributed byRogue Pictures
Release date
  • August 29, 2007 (2007-08-29)
Running time
90 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Box office$41.1 million[1]

Plot

Eleven-year-old Randy Daytona becomes anxious when he learns that his father Peter has bet on his performance in the 1988 Summer Olympics table tennis finals. During his first game between his opponent Karl Wolfschtagg from the German Democratic Republic, Daytona has an accident and suffers an injury. Unable to continue, he loses the match. Loan sharks, in the employ of criminal mastermind Feng, murder his father, and Daytona leaves competitive ping-pong.

Nineteen years later, Daytona is dismissed from the Peppermill casino and meets FBI agent Ernie Rodriguez, who requests his assistance in arresting Feng for running guns. Feng's hidden jungle hideout hosts a black-market Ping-Pong tournament, and Daytona's invitation is a way for the FBI to infiltrate Feng's organization. When Daytona agrees, Rodriguez tells him to win enough championships that Feng's scouts notice him. After losing a local tournament, Daytona is apprenticed to a blind man in Chinatown named Wong, who was Feng's former mentor. Daytona also meets Wong's niece, Maggie. When locals vandalize Master Wong's house for violating their edict against teaching white people ping pong, Daytona is forced to play against "The Dragon", a young girl, in exchange for Wong's right to stay. After Daytona beats the Dragon, Feng's men take notice of his win and bring Daytona, Rodriguez, and Wong to Feng's facility.

Daytona handily beats his first opponent, Freddy "Fingers" Wilson, though he is unnerved to learn that the tournament is literally sudden death—the loser is killed by a poisoned dart delivered by Feng's majordomo, Mahogany. After Daytona attempts unsuccessfully to escape, Feng invites him to join his side and reveals that he only finished half of Wong's training. He says it would be the ultimate satisfaction to win Daytona away from Wong. Feng also shows Daytona his specially modified ping-pong table. It is wired to special vests that give increasingly powerful and fatal electrical shocks for failure. Daytona informs Rodriguez of a hidden cache of illegal guns that are sufficient to put Feng in jail. While Rodriguez investigates the hidden facilities, Daytona defeats numerous opponents for his life.

Upon learning that Wolfschtagg is his last opponent, Daytona requests extraction. Rodriguez comes up with a plan to brutally injure Daytona, so that he has to quit. Rodriguez breaks Daytona's arm before Daytona can tell him that he has changed his mind. Feng discovers Rodriguez's attempts to contact the FBI and forces Daytona to face Wolfschtagg, then substitutes Maggie. When Wolfschtagg protests, Feng kills him. Daytona plays one-handed and tries to stall for time. Maggie tries to lose on purpose to sacrifice herself. However, Daytona uses his ping-pong expertise to hit Maggie with the ball. While this goes on, they escape together. Enraged, Feng orders them both executed. Mahogany shoots a poisonous dart at Daytona, but Maggie defends him with the ping-pong paddle. Daytona then throws the poisoned paddle back at Mahogany, killing her. The FBI swarms the place, during which the heroes attempt to escape, but Daytona's attempts to rescue Feng's sex slaves causes their capture. Feng plays Daytona to determine which of Wong's students is the superior ping pong player.

During the game, Daytona trips Feng's Bodyguard who was carrying the self-destruct button thus setting off the self-destruct sequence's five-minute countdown. Feng reveals there is no way to turn off the suits. He also states that he changed the rules so that the ball can now be bounced off any surface once and still be in play. As the self-destruct sequence countdown progresses, the game moves through several buildings and finally onto a bridge over a nearby river. After Wong informs Daytona that Feng has a weak backhand, Daytona exploits his weakness, and Feng is electrocuted, falling into the river. Daytona and his friends, along with Feng's slaves, escape in Wong's boat as the facility explodes. Two months later, the major characters are reunited for the reopening of Master Wong's rebuilt Mushu shop.

Cast
James Hong with Dan Fogler at the 2007 Comic-Con convention for a panel on the film

Reception

As of June 2020, the film holds a 21% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 131 reviews with an average score of 4.2/10. The site's consensus reads: "Tasteless, yet harmless, Balls of Fury nevertheless fails to generate enough laughs despite its lowbrow intentions".[2] On Metacritic the film has a score of 38 out of 100 based on 26 reviews, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews."[3]

Brian Lowry of Variety magazine wrote: "Relentlessly silly in spoofing martial-arts movie conventions, Balls of Fury has roughly enough laughs for a first-class trailer but wheezes, gasps and finally goes flat through much of its 90 minutes."[4] In Leonard Maltin's annual publication "TV Movies," the film is given a BOMB rating.

The film opened with a U.S. take on the opening weekend of $11,352,123. The U.S. final gross, on November 4, 2007, was $32,886,940.[1]

Video game

A tie-in game for Balls of Fury was released for Wii and Nintendo DS[5] by Black Lantern. The storyline involves an underground ping-pong competition, based on the film. The Nintendo DS version was released on September 9, 2007, with the Wii version following on September 25. Both versions take advantage of motion controls to play ping pong, and were not well received. The Wii version was panned by critics,[6] while the Nintendo DS version received better, but mixed reviews.[7] IGN scored the Wii version a 1.2 out of 10,[8] but scored the DS version a 6.5 out of 10.[9]

gollark: Regexes, splitting at equals signs or some kind of state machine maybe.
gollark: I might be somewhat annoyed about someone not paying me a cut of that, except I didn't even invent the algorithm.
gollark: Besides, that isn't particularly evil.
gollark: It's actually ported from someone's Haskell implementation but several times faster, so you could just have NFTized output from that anyway.
gollark: I'm sure people will definitely use my fractal art program, random esolangs, deliberately inefficient matrix multiplier program, slow full text search thing, and length terminated strings for evil.

References
  1. "Balls of Fury (2007)". Box Office Mojo.
  2. "Balls of Fury (2007)". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved June 5, 2020.
  3. "Balls of Fury". Metacritic.
  4. Lowry, Brian (August 23, 2007). "Balls of Fury". Variety.
  5. "Wii News: Four new Wii games revealed". ComputerAndVideoGames.com. Archived from the original on 2007-10-16. Retrieved 2008-01-09.
  6. "Balls of Fury (Wii)". Metacritic. Retrieved 15 September 2018.
  7. "Balls of Fury (DS)". Metacritic. Retrieved 15 September 2018.
  8. Casamassina, Matt (16 October 2007). "Balls of Fury Review (Wii)". IGN. Retrieved 15 September 2018.
  9. Harris, Craig (8 October 2007). "Balls of Fury Review (Nintendo DS)". IGN. Retrieved 15 September 2018.
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