Life > September 6, 2007

By Will Burke | Staff writer

I didn’t know a comedy could be so depressing. I should have seen all the warning signs; mediocre previews leading up to it, a PG-13 rating and loads of giddy pre-teens sitting around my reluctant friends and myself.

But two hopes kept me going, beckoning me like the mythical sirens they are: ping-pong and Christopher Walken.

I love them both, but writer/director Ben Garant (the man who spawned Reno 911!: Miami) successfully steers this movie straight into the iceberg of stale clichés.

Randy Daytona (Dan Fogler) was a promising young ping-pong player until a tragedy at the 1988 Olympics derailed him from the fast track to fame and landed him in Reno performing novelty acts.

FBI Agent Rodriguez (George Lopez) asks Daytona to help the FBI investigate gun-smuggler Feng (Christopher Walken) by infiltrating his ping-pong tournament. Hilarity may or may not ensue.

Let’s start with the writing and directing, since they deserve most of the blame.

Anyone who has seen an episode of Reno 911! knows that plot is not a particularly strong point of Ben Garant’s.

You can get by with that in a comedy if the jokes are good enough, but Garant rarely strays from the beaten path into originality.

The 80s, kung fu movies, sports movies, blind people, gay people, getting-hit-in-the-nuts – all are examples of areas where Garant blandly relies on ancient jokes to get laughs.

The problem is that he takes the easy way out on all of these. Daytona’s blind trainer, Master Wong (played gamely by James Hong) probably walks into something 18 times.

It hasn’t been funny since I was in the fourth grade, and even then that kind of cheap slapstick was starting to get old.

Daytona’s completely unexplained love connection with Master Wong’s gorgeous niece, Maggie Wong (the beautiful Maggie Q) is another example of how the weak patchwork plot doesn’t holds together well.

But the greatest problem with this movie is that the main character is played by a nobody with almost no talent for comedic delivery.

Dan Fogler sports some sweet muttonchops, but I don’t remember laughing at anything he did.

However, George Lopez may be even more disappointing as an extremely unfunny FBI agent. Why would they give a stand-up comedian the straightest role in the movie?

The only way it could have been worse would be if Carlos Mencia played the character.

That would have sent Agent Rodriguez from the world of unfunniness into the realm of active hatred.

The first hour of the movie is slow and painfully unfunny. This is a serious problem in a movie that is only 90 minutes long.

What saves the last 30 minutes is the arrival of Christopher Walken as Feng, the gay arch-villain who appears in ridiculous Liberace outfits and brings a smile to my face every time he says something.

The problems that Lopez and Fogler have delivering their “funny” lines are virtually non-existent with the seasoned Walken.

That’s not to say that I was falling out of my seat with uncontrollable laughter, but at least I wasn’t sinking down into it out of shame when he graced the screen.

Releasing this movie anywhere near another comedy was a mistake, but releasing it so close to a great, popular comedy like Superbad is absolutely deadly.

There is no way to compare the two; it would be like comparing Jesus to Hitler. It’s closer in spirit to Dodgeball, but without any of the ingenuity that made that movie work.

I can only think of three truly funny things in the movie. James Hong’s wise teachings on ping-pong are pretty funny.

The first time I really laughed out loud during the film was when he compared the game of ping-pong to a cheap prostitute.

Almost anything Christopher Walken said made me laugh simply because of the way he said his lines.

The third somewhat funny part is a joke about a dead panda. The rest of the movie is filled with either mildly amusing gags or painfully embarrassing attempts.

If you do decide to go see this movie, you probably shouldn’t tell any of your friends, unless they’re all in middle school.