Following Dodgeball, Blades of Glory, and Talladega Nights, the silly-sports movie continues with this lower-rent effort that can’t compete with the first two movies but out-funnies Will Ferrell’s laugh-poor racing car dud.

Dan Fogler is one-time ping pong prodigy Randy Daytona, who blew his big chance at championship glory when his dad (a cameo-ing Robert Patrick) bet everything on the game and little Randy cracked under the pressure.

Years later and dad dead at the hands of the evil Feng (an eye-popping Walken garbed in a variety of Memoirs of a Geisha cast-offs), Randy is paddling balls for laughs in a bargain basement Reno club.

Redemption comes in the shape of Feng’s illegal ping-pong tournament that the FBI recruits Randy to infiltrate. But first he must put the ying/yang into his ping-pong with the help of the blind Master Wong (Hong) and his niece Maggie (Q).

Good-natured and with bouts of inspired lunacy, Balls of Fury is a film you wished you liked more and suspect was three or four rewrites away from greatness.

A midway sag and some chopped-off subplots hint at drastic re-structuring and pruning, and director Robert Ben Garant’s direction is strictly straight to video.

But, the film knows a fat man playing ping pong is funny, two fat men playing ping pong is funnier and two fat Chinese men in sports gear playing ping pong while smoking is laugh out loud.

The zaniness is tripped up by laziness (a blind man falling over is only amusing the first twelve times), but when the laughs dry up the cast keep spirits high.

Fogler is a slobbish but enjoyable lead, and Hong, writer Lennon (as Randy’s German nemesis), and Terry Crews (as a ping pong adversary) are ever-watchable gag-meisters, while Maggie Q gives charm and personality to her thigh-candy role.

But, this is Walken’s show and his vanity-free Fu Manchu Widow Twanky makes the idea of him doing West End panto in the near future not entirely unbelievable.

Rob Daniel