Balles de feu

In a time when we are mostly given the sequel to a rip-off of a sequel to a blockbuster, I'm grateful for any movie that is slightly original, and I haven't seen any other movies yet about a Ping-Pong tournament to the death - have you? Even if some elements were familiar like the secret agents and Asian villains and although a couple of jokes fell flat, "Balls of Fury" has enough fresh ideas to offer to work well as a comedy. It helped that the hero was played by an unknown actor instead one of the usual comedy stars because he plays a nobody - somebody who once almost became a hero at the Olympics but lost. He doesn't deserve a second chance but gets one, anyway - encouraged by his coach with words of wisdom like "believe in yourself when nobody else does... like now"! Maggie Q as his training partner is hot, and Chris Walken as Feng adds the eccentric element which fits the colorful scenery. I liked it.

It is not that bad. I am one of the guys who like this. It is not bad comparing to the movies that were recently released in Singapore. Underdog is not very good, can't even be a superhero movie. Shoot em' up is for hard-core action fans and basically is very violent and bloody. Then it is Balls of fury which I enjoyed watching. I thought it was something like Prince of tennis, the live-action movie and the ping-pong ball fights scenes are something like that. That, the ping-pong ball fights, is the thing that attracted me to watch it. But Prince of tennis is better than this. Balls of fury got the comedy and the simple action which becomes a harmless fun movie. I like movies as long as they are fun or entertaining. Balls of fury, though fun, is considered quite dumb for some mature adults or teenagers, the director used stupid jokes like always get hit in the groin and banging into the wall. It has to be stupid to be funny. Sometimes, I admit that it is quite dumb in some of the scenes but it is fun, it got slow-motion ball fights, it got Maggie Q who is hot and it got dumb-a** jokes so what more you want for a dumb comedy.

Overall, it makes a harmless movie that you can watch in your free time. It can be funny sometime and it too can be dumb sometime. You may laugh or smile at some scenes. I don't know but I smiled when watching it even at the stupidest jokes. Best to leave your brains at home while watching. This movie is not to be taken seriously.

What are people whining about? Balls of Fury was quite funny! A few years ago, the people who are now trashing this movie would have been going gaga and adding a 100 million to its gross revenue...but that's part of the problem. Tastes have changed.

I'm going to go on the record as saying that this movie is at least as funny as anything Adam Sandler or Will Ferrel has ever made. Why is it doing worse then? People just don't want silly, stupid comedies anymore, which is why Superbad is doing much better instead.

Balls of Fury is a very funny movie with a wonderful cast (especially Christopher Walken and Thomas Lennon), and if some of the jokes fall flat, or gave themselves away in the trailer, the movie moves quickly enough that it doesn't matter. They're already onto another joke.

Times have changed, and unfortunately for the movie, so have tastes. These days, even silly spoofs are expected to meet a required level of maturity, and for those that were raised on Naked Gun, Hot Shots and Police Academy movies, that's a little sad.

Go ahead, say the movie is juvenile. Say it's stupid. Just don't say it isn't funny. There were at least three moments during the movie when the entire theater was rolling in the aisles. I've never seen a SNL alumni movie do that.

This has to be, quite possibly, the dumbest movie I have seen in a very, very long time.

However, that is not necessarily a bad thing. I don't think there was a single moment in this film that purposely wanted any smidgen of intelligence whatsoever.

And, heck, the reason I went to see this movie was because I thought it looked funny. And, guess what? I laughed. I don't know if this will go into the treasury of greatest stupid movies ever made, but it did leave me with a smile on my face.

I think it was because it was ping-pong. Yes, I like a good game of ping-pong as much as the next person, but come on. It's ping-pong. Just try telling that to these characters. The fact that anyone could take so slight a game so seriously cracked me up.

And that's where this movie works.

It's pointless, silly, and down-right brain cell killing. But I found myself forgiving everyone because they were so good-hearted in waltzing around with their idiotic humor.

No, it will probably not be nominated for Best Picture. But as for dumb comedy goes, this nicely held its own.

I went into the theater expecting almost nothing good coming out of it. I read the reviews- Washington Post, USA Today, Rotten Tomatoes, etc. I knew they were horrible and quite honestly, I thought I would hate the movie. But my friend wanted to go, and me having no life whatsoever, I agreed to join her.

I have to say, I should go into to more movies with such low expectations, because I really enjoyed it. Was the acting superior? No. Was the script well-written? No. But it was funny and Christopher Walken makes all things glorious, so all in all, it wasn't a bad way to spend a Thursday night after an especially terrible day of work. The actors all seemed to realize that they weren't participating in a project that would make movie history and they all seemed OK with that. It was very much a movie done to simply enjoy the play on the word "balls" and in this particular case, it was forgivable.

Overall, don't go in expecting complete comedic genius and you just might find yourself laughing.