Why do so many documentary
filmmakers nurture a secret desire to make lowbrow comedies and genre pictures?
Prior to co-writing and directing Ping Pong Playa, Jessica Yu had a reputation as one
of the most daring documentarians around, thanks to features like the stylish,
thoughtful In The Realms Of The Unreal and Protagonist, and shorts like the Academy Award-winning
"Breathing Lessons." Now, in the grand tradition of Canadian Bacon and The Dark Wind, Yu has made a fiction feature that
contains little to no traces of anything that made her doc work special. In fact,
it's practically remedial.
Which doesn't mean Ping Ping
Playa is bad,
necessarily—or at least not as bad as Canadian Bacon or The Dark Wind. For the most part, it's an amiable
underdog sports comedy, co-written by and starring Jimmy Tsai as an L.A. slacker
who's forced by circumstance to take over his mother's table-tennis class and
his brother's spot in an annual tournament. Because Tsai is essentially an
overgrown kid himself—known to hang around the elementary-school
basketball court, where he still dominates—he fits right in among his new
students, a group of overachieving nerds whom he teaches to carry themselves
with a certain hip-hop swagger.
Ping Pong Playa is more low-key and likeable than
most oppressive Hollywood comedies—Balls Of Fury, for example—and it's nice to
see the kind of Asian-American neighborhoods and characters that rarely make it
to the big screen. But aside from the casting and the location shooting,
there's not much to distinguish Ping Pong Playa from Ladybugs or The Mighty Ducks. It looks cheaper, and its script isn't as
tightly constructed, but otherwise, it's thoroughly average. One odd choice
that Yu and Tsai make is to blank out all the swear words—even the PG-13
ones—with the sound of a basketball or ping-pong ball bouncing, and that
weird sound effect kind of encapsulates Ping Pong Playa. Something is missing here.