Balls of Fury

August 30, 2007

Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 90 min Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Balls of Fury faithfully follows the famous 80-20 rule. In this Hollywood usage, you put forth about 20% of the effort required for a kick-ass movie and you can get something passable. At first look, a movie with a quality rating of 80% might seem pretty good…but remember what 80% was in high school? In my day it was a C+. And a C+ movie equates to only 3 stars no matter how you want to cut it.

Balls of Fury On the plus side, there are several laugh-out-loud moments in the movie and you gotta thank a gifted writing team for those. Unfortunately, the laughs are not frequent enough. And, to make matters worse, director Ben Garant decided to make that most common mistake of trying to make the movie MORE than a pure comedy. You’ll find several awkwardly placed (and badly choreographed) action scenes as well as painfully laughable attempts at drama in between the laughs.

As to the performances, Walken’s is the most telling. Pretty much everyone that walks in front of the camera is sleepwalking through their roles with Walken being the worst of the bunch. The only characters with any real life to them are Fogler’s and Lopez’s…and even they seem kind of disinterested in whats going on from time to time. Walken, however, is just simply wooden in his role.

The plot is about as simple as they come and the predictabilty of it would be rather humorous if it weren’t so depressing to have to sit through. Sure, there’re a few rib busters in the movie, but no where near enough for me to recommend this as anything other than a rental.

Posted by Alex | Filed Under 3 Stars, Action, Christopher Walken, Comedy, Dan Fogler, George Lopez, Maggie Q, PG-13, Theatrical