Before you press play
Watch if
You play pickleball, or you want something warm and undemanding on while you cook or have people over.
Wait if
You want a comedy that actually makes you laugh rather than one you smile politely through.
The Dink is the kind of film you put on while you are making dinner, and it is completely happy to be that. It has a washed-up athlete, a difficult father, an unlikely partner and a big match at the end, and it hits all four beats on time. It is also a comedy that does not really make you laugh, which ought to be fatal and somehow is not.
Is The Dink funny?
Not very, and it is worth being specific about the failure. The jokes are built properly. Sean Clements's script sets each one up, the delivery is competent, and then what comes out of you is a huh rather than a laugh. Put it next to Friends or Veep, where a joke arrives and you make an actual noise, and the gap is obvious.
A few gags do land. Dusty being ordered to take up the one sport he despises is a clean premise joke and it keeps paying quietly. Better still is his father knowing far too much about his son's sex life, because the doctor talks. There is also a genuinely funny stretch of trash talk between two of the pickleball regulars, which is the only time the film is properly mean and the only time it is properly funny.
The rest is pleasant, and pleasant is not the same as comic.
Jake Johnson as Dusty Boyd
Dusty Boyd (Jake Johnson) was a teenage tennis prodigy who broke his wrist in a junior match against Andy Roddick and never went pro. Decades later he teaches at his father's club, still angry about it, still certain he is the best player in the room. He is, technically. The room is full of people who cannot play.
That is the good idea here. Dusty has built a small world where his ranking is safe, and he has staffed it: PJ (Aaron Chen), his assistant, exists largely to agree with him. Jake Johnson plays the smallness of it well, and the film does not hurry to make him likeable.
It does give him a full arc. The complaint is not that the change is missing. The complaint is how quietly all of it is played, when a man dismantling thirty years of self-protection should land harder than this.
Ed Harris as Chuck Boyd and the club
Chuck Boyd (Ed Harris) runs the club, resents the pickleball players crowding his courts, and has spent his son's entire life making it clear he is a disappointment. Ed Harris plays him as a man who has never once considered that he might be the problem.
Chuck gets a late turn of his own, and the thinking behind it is colder and less sentimental than the scene lets on. It also arrives very late and is barely developed.
Mary Steenburgen as Candace
Candace (Mary Steenburgen) took up pickleball after a divorce, and she and Dusty end up playing as a pair. The country bar scene is the one that matters. It does more to pull him out of himself than any amount of pickleball does, and it is where the friendship stops being a convenience of the plot.
Then Dusty decides it should be a romance. The distinction is worth holding onto, because the film does not agree with him. It reads his attraction as one more symptom of the loneliness rather than the opening of a couple, and that is the most perceptive thing in the story.
It is also tidied away faster than it earns.
The supporting cast and the cameos
There are a lot of names on this poster. Ben Stiller, Patton Oswalt, Chloe Fineman, Chris Parnell and Christine Taylor all turn up, and John McEnroe commentates, which is close enough to his day job that it barely counts as casting.
None of it does much. The cameos are prominent enough to help sell the film and too thinly written to improve it. As a reason to press play that is perfectly fair. As comedy it is decoration.
Is The Dink worth watching?
Yes, on the right terms. If you play pickleball you will have a good time. If you want something easy on while people are over or dinner is cooking, it does that job better than most films trying much harder.
It is a 2.5, DIMMED. Not because anything in it is broken, but because it plays everything at the same gentle volume, the laughs and the wounds alike. You will enjoy it and you will not talk about it afterwards. It is on Apple TV.
The wrist. Dusty Boyd (Jake Johnson) eventually admits he broke his own wrist on purpose in that junior match, because losing to Andy Roddick outright would have been worse than being injured. It reframes the whole character and it lands. The film treats the confession as relief, which is generous to him, given he spent thirty years building an identity out of an injury he chose.
Candace's refusal. Dusty confesses, and Candace (Mary Steenburgen) tells him plainly that she is not attracted to him. The film is right to refuse the romance and right about why, and then it moves on almost immediately. A rejection that honest deserves more than one bad night before everyone is friends again.
The duel. Dusty switches sides and represents the pickleball players. Chuck Boyd (Ed Harris) counters by hiring Andy Roddick. Dusty wins the coin toss and picks the club's neglected pickleball court, using the bad surface to unsettle him, which only buys time because Roddick adapts fast. He wins in the end by giving up power altogether, drawing Roddick into a soft rally and finishing with the dink he would once have sneered at.
That last part is the best structural idea in the film. The contrivance is still a contrivance, because he chose the venue and the venue does a great deal of work for him, and the film scores the whole thing as triumph rather than as the small engineered win it is. But the finish belongs to the character rather than to the court.
Chuck's pride. Chuck finds a way to be proud of his son, and what he is proud of is that the boy beat Roddick, with the pickleball part quietly filed off. That is colder and funnier than the scene seems to realise.
The nickname. Having won by playing soft, Dusty loses "The Hammer" and Candace renames him The Dink, which the group adopts on the spot. It is the best joke in the film and it is the last one, which is an awkward thing to be true of a comedy.
The ending. Six months on, Dusty is the club's President of Pickleball Operations, Chuck is happily playing, and Dusty and Candace enter a tournament as partners. He got the courts and he got the spine, which is a real ending and not a cheat. The club will probably do better out of it too, since the film has already shown the demand is there. It just arrives at the same volume as everything else.
Bright Bulbs
- It never sneers at pickleball or the people who play it, and a lazier film would have made that its entire joke.
- Candace (Mary Steenburgen) and Dusty work as a double act, and the script is smart enough not to convert that into a couple.
- The lawyer picking apart the club rulebook is one of the better small pleasures here. More satisfying than funny, but welcome.
Dull Bulbs
- Chuck Boyd (Ed Harris) is written as a single note of disapproval, and Ed Harris is plainly capable of a good deal more.
- Dusty's one-sided romantic turn arrives abruptly, and the film gives Candace's refusal far too little aftermath.
Shattered Bulbs
- The comedy rarely escalates. Scene after scene settles for being amiable at the exact point where a joke would have to commit.
Cast
- Jake Johnson as Dusty Boyd
- Mary Steenburgen as Candace
- Ed Harris as Chuck Boyd
- Aaron Chen as PJ
- Ben Stiller as Dr. Stone
- Chloe Fineman as Marisa
- Patton Oswalt as Skip
- Martin Kove as Mitch
- Chris Parnell as Neil
- Christine Taylor as Bea
- Andy Roddick as Himself
- John McEnroe as Himself