The Dink
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: PG-13
Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes
Stars: Jake Johnson, Mary Steenburgen, Aaron Chen, Ed Harris
Writer: Sean Clements
Director: Josh Greenbaum
Streaming on Apple TV
The Dink is an imperfect comedy, for sure, but at least it’s the funniest film ever made about pickleball, which is remarkable when you consider how utterly goofy pickleball is even when people are playing it straight.
Jake Johnson, a poker-faced comedian mostly known as a costar of TV’s New Girl, stars as Dusty Boyd, a former teen tennis prodigy who flamed out early following a spectacular meltdown versus Andy Roddick (playing himself in a role that should automatically earn him the Good Sport of the Year Award).
Flash forward 20 years or so, and Dusty is now the hapless tennis pro at a high-class club run by his father (Ed Harris, putting on his grumpy face). Clueless regarding his obvious ridiculousness, Dusty regales his pre-pubescent students with tales of his past glories, egged on by the one and only person who still thinks he’s worth idolizing, an assistant ball boy named PJ (deadpan Australian comic Aaron Chen).
Private humiliations aside, things are going pretty okay for Dusty until the club grudgingly allocates one of its most remote, poorly maintained courts to members who want to play pickleball. Snorting his disapproval, Dusty – finally encountering a strata of sport enthusiasts to whom he can feel superior – heaps verbal abuse on the pickleballers.
But then he meets Candace (Mary Steenburgen), a pretty pickler who, while old enough to be his grandmom, nevertheless wins Dusty over by offering to teach him the game.
The Dink follows a much-Xeroxed roadmap of outsider sports comedies, many of them starring Adam Sandler, but having their original iteration in 1980’s Caddyshack, with Johnson as a slightly cleaned-up Bill Murray and Harris a somewhat less repulsive Ted Knight. The comedic lines are less well-defined here, as first-time feature film writer Sean Clements and director Josh Greenbaum (who helmed the stellar documentary Will & Harper) can’t bring themselves to portray Dusty as an absolute loser from the start, which makes his ultimate redemption a lot less satisfying.
Co-producer Ben Stiller turns up as Dusty’s doctor, a bit that starts out funny but, as with most doctor visits, goes on too long. I can’t help but feel Stiller had a hand in the final script, which is peppered with Stilleresque flourishes – you know, that tendency his characters have to make a statement, then mumblingly re-state their statement, then slowly back out of the room uttering barely-audible versions of the same statement. It can be very funny when Stiller does it; a little derivative when anyone else tries, and in this case just about everyone takes a stab at it.
Johnson has his endearing moments in the film, especially when Steenburgen, ever the pro, helps him lift his game. Former SNL regular Chris Parnell turns up for a minute and the movie would benefit from more of him. As Dusty’s slavish acolyte, Chen needs to learn the delicate art of making a thoroughly annoying character on some level appealing, rather than relentlessly tedious.
The Dink works best when director Greenbaum lampoons tennis players’ disdain for pickleball, an aversion that can, in real life, reach Medieval Crusades-like intensity (“Oh, I get it,” Roddick sneers, “it’s like tennis, only easy”). Mel Brooks has tapped Greenbaum to direct next year’s much-anticipated Spaceballs: The New One. Let’s hope, with a stronger script, he’s up to the task. May the Flick Shot be with him.
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