Balls of Fury (2007)

Image credit: Gemma La Mana

GAME OVER Christopher Walken gets paddled in Balls of Fury, a weird mash-up of kung fu and Ping-Pong that falls flat

Balls of Fury is a joke of a title in search of a movie with a single good joke. It's the kind of comedy that finds Asian people hi-lar-ious because they're...Asian. (Are you laughing yet?) Dan Fogler, as a disgraced American Ping-Pong wizard who is plucked by the FBI to infiltrate an underground table-tennis tournament, is shortish and chunky, with hair-metal curls and sideburns wedgier than Elvis'. A studio head must have barked, ''Get me a Jack Black type!'' The actor Fogler most reminds me of, though, is Curtis Armstrong, that s----eating-grinned junior hustler from Revenge of the Nerds and Risky Business.

In his Def Leppard T-shirt, Fogler is apprenticed, Karate Kid-style, to a blind Chinese restaurant owner (James Hong) who says things like ''Remember, you suck when you are nervous!'' He then goes off to the Ping-Pong death match presided over by Feng — played by Christopher Walken in outfits that make him look a transvestite geisha, only with his good old spacey-mobster-from-Queens delivery intact. It's meant to be a hoot that Walken showed up and mumbled his lines as if he didn't know the camera was on, but the audience ends up about as bored as he looks.