Sport comedies have a great history of anarchic energy; think Kingpin or Caddyshack or Happy Gilmore. Apple TV’s new film The Dink, however, takes a disappointingly gentler approach in depicting the gentle American sport of pickleball when it should, surely, be taking a wrecking ball to it.
Indeed, it is set up in this way, with a backstory about Dusty (Jake Johnson), once the bright young hope of tennis and nicknamed “The Hammer”, until an accident during a game with Andy Roddick ended his career while still in his teens. Now a middle-aged, mildly loser-ish coach working for his tennis club-owning father Chuck (Ed Harris), he winds up trying out pickleball as a break and finds fun, expression and nearromance with older woman Candace (Mary Steenburgen). This latter aspect is almost a refreshing flip of the usual older male actor/younger love interest dynamic (Johnson is 48, Steenburgen is 73), but as with everything here, it chooses a safe option over anything too outrageous — she rebuffs his crush, wanting him for a nice pickleball partner alone.
This is not a comedy of excess — it is a soft star vehicle for Johnson, best known for the series New Girl with Zooey Deschanel. While he’s likeable enough, he doesn’t possess the comic edge of a Bill Murray or Adam Sandler to really make the film fly. There’s long been a strain of post-John Belushi, American bearded dumb-ass wild men comedians which reached a mirthless nadir with the appalling Jack Black, and while Johnson doesn’t try quite so nauseatingly hard as Black, his dialled-down act doesn’t bring much humour. Steenburgen is as appealing as ever, and no one gives grumpy patriarch as well as Harris. Ben Stiller makes an OK cameo as Dusty’s sex-obsessed doctor who wants to get him laid. Better is Aaron Chen as comedy sidekick PJ, who has one great monologue about his relationship with an older woman crush, but since he’s an objectumsexual and attracted to inanimate objects, the “she” in question is the USS Alabama.
Such derangement is rare though, in a film which chooses to be a comedy with a heart and mistakenly believes the best way to do this is to have extended scenes of Dusty falling in love with country music. A comedy which can’t get over the net.
