Cheap thrills
Balls of Fury
If Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger could further diplomacy on ping-pong, why can’t the FBI use it to bust a global arms mafia? That question settled, Balls of Fury is a decently funny film about a down-and-out, overweight former prodigy (Dan Fogler) who is recruited by the FBI to catch Feng (a delightfully over-the-top Christopher Walken). Feng is a legendary criminal, and a famous ping-pong player himself. Now apart from building guns that can pass any metal detector (they are transparent, you see), he also hosts a ping-pong tournament to which all the best players in the world are invited.
The fact that a loss in any game at any stage means sudden death, literally, doesn’t seem to affect either the attendance at Feng’s table, nor the FBI’s efforts to catch him.
It was a masterstroke to cast Walken as Feng, as he falls somewhere in between. A few laughs are guaranteed, even if you skip the obvious jokes in a film with a title as this one.

SHALINI LANGER

Two much
I Know Who Killed Me
GIVEN Lindsay Lohan’s colourful public behaviour and continuing legal difficulties, playing a stripper with a crack-head mom might not have been the best way to distract from her tabloid image. In the gory psychological thriller I Know Who Killed Me, Lohan also plays a wealthy college student who writes fiction, excels at the piano and refuses to sleep with her boyfriend. That’s all right, then. Both characters are more credible than the plot. A serial killer is stalking New Salem, and when one Lohan disappears only to show up later minus her memory and several peripheral body parts, the FBI assumes the killer will return to finish the job. Pretentious and inane, the film arouses unexpected sympathy for Lohan.