Thursday, July 31, 2008

Rising Versus Risible Action

Balls Of Fury is a parody of sports, kung fu and espionage movies. It's not meant to be taken any more seriously than "A Fistful Of Yen" in The Kentucky Fried Movie. Still, it breaks a basic rule of storytelling, and that makes a difference .

After a prologue showing our hero failing at ping pong as a child, the plot is about how he redeems himself as an adult. It follows the classic line of a guy down in the dumps getting his act together. Except the first time we see him grown up, he's amazingly good at ping pong, and it's hard to believe he has to go through any training to get his skills back.



When he does meet his trainer, she's also amazing. In fact, we never see any better ping pong than in these two scenes. The challenges have to get tougher for the hero as the story goes along, or it's not satisfying. Perhaps they thought no one would care, but it hurt my enjoyment of the movie.

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