Who's in It: Dan Fogler, Christopher Walken, George Lopez, Maggie Q, Robert Patrick, Thomas Lennon
The Basics: It's a table tennis death match, and former child champion Fogler has to win or else. And there are enough laughs here to make a good trailer. Or a bad sitcom. Or a really bad movie. Which is what it is: full of dead space from a lazy script. Furthermore, have they exhausted all the sports yet? What have they not made a dumb sports/game comedy about yet? Red Rover? That kind of skiing where you shoot stuff, too? "Hungry Hungry Hippos"?
What's the Deal? What happened here? This is from Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant. They're the guys responsible for Reno: 911!, a show that's almost always funny. I wanted this to be as good as that. But it's not. And I don't just mean it's mildly disappointing. I mean that it felt like someone took a dry-cleaning bag and cinched it around my neck with a rubber band and suffocated me.
Flashes of Not-Unfunny: Kerri Kenney-Silver (Reno: 911!) shows up for a second and will make you laugh. So does Patton Oswalt (the voice of the main mouse in Ratatouille). But then they go away. And Walken as the gay Ping-Pong Master with an all-male harem is kind of funny because he doesn't do a stereotypically gay voice, he just goes with that trademark Christopher Walken way of speaking.
Also Gets Points for: Def Leppard songs. Used ironically, sadly, but still, it's Def Leppard. And they were great.
What Might Possibly Be a Way to See It Without Suffering Too Much: Someday it will be on cable. And maybe you'll go into the living room, and it will be just there in front of your eyes because someone left the TV on and walked out, like for a 10-mile hike. And they took the remote with them so you can't change the channel. If after that, you feel suddenly woozy and need to lie down for a while to stop the spinning, this movie won't be the most offensive background noise ever. But you'll probably be wishing you could just get off the couch and turn it off manually.