TRUTH-in-advertising alert: Christopher Walken does not actu ally show up in Asian drag until halfway through “Balls of Fury” – not enough to salvage this mostly unfunny, extremely silly pingpong comedy.
Tony winner Dan Fogler literally works up a sweat trying to put over this thin script in his role as Randy Daytona, former child prodigy who abandons table tennis after a disastrous defeat by a German competitor (co-screenwriter Thomas Lennon) at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Two decades later, the fat and slovenly Randy is recruited by FBI agent Rodriguez (George Lopez). Rodriguez wants Randy to make a comeback so he’ll be invited to an unsanctioned pingpong championship hosted by a mysterious international arms dealer named Feng – who also happens to have murdered Randy’s father.
The extremely out-of-shape Randy is coached by an elderly blind man (veteran scene-stealer James Hong) and his gorgeous niece – played by Hong Kong superstar Maggie Q – who improbably falls for Randy.
The movie goes steadily downhill, finally arriving at Feng’s match “somewhere in Central America,” where losers are dispatched with poison darts and even the male competitors are entertained by male sex slaves.
Even Walken’s eventual appearance as Feng – wearing a collection of brightly colored cloaked robes that make him resemble a cross between Dracula and Ming the Merciless – doesn’t help much.
Walken’s unique delivery can’t do much for lines like “Kill them both – we’re missing ‘Antiques Roadshow’ ” and “I won’t bite . . . in any way that would show.”
The tacky “Balls of Fury” is ploddingly directed by Robert Ben Garant, who with Lennon collaborated on the far funnier “Reno 911!” and the less-than-
distinguished scripts of “Night at the Museum” and “The Pacifier” – both of which look like models of comic construction compared with this latest one.
BALLS OF FURY Paging Forrest Gump.Running time: 90 minutes. Rated PG-13 (crude, sex-related humor and profanity). At the Empire, the Chelsea, the Union Square, others.