You don’t have to hit hard to win pickleball — that’s the chief lesson to be taken from “The Dink,” a sports comedy titled for the dainty signature shot of the fast-growing racket sport, and it’s one that Josh Greenbaum‘s film takes to heart with its own softball comic style. Following a conceited former tennis prodigy as he’s taught a lesson in humility by a bunch of enthusiastic amateur pickleballers, this amiable-enough Apple TV original aims for the non-confrontational good vibes that most associate with the newer game, while also presenting its players as fiercer competitors than you might think.
The presence of Ben Stiller as producer (and in an oddly flat supporting role) underlines a parallel with 2004’s “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story,” which likewise poked gentle fun at a sport that fundamentally cannot be made to look cool on screen. But where that film was often raucously funny in its knockabout silliness, throwing out gags so fast it didn’t matter if a lot of them missed, “The Dink” has considerably less frenetic energy, or energy at all really.
More cheerfully lightweight than it is actively funny, the film is mostly content to coast on the affable hangdog charm of “New Girl” star Jake Johnson — who’s a commendably likable anchor for proceedings considering his character is, at least half the time, a blundering douchebag. He’s bolstered by a classy ensemble of supporting players who are uniformly under-challenged (save perhaps for good-sport tennis pros Andy Roddick and John McEnroe as themselves), but at least a perma-glowing Mary Steenburgen gets the most to do as his not-quite-romantic foil.
Dangled all too briefly, the possibility of a convention-flipping love affair between the 48-year-old Johnson and 73-year-old Steenburgen — who do, let it be said, have endearingly sparky chemistry — is pretty much the only surprise on offer in an otherwise strictly formulaic script by “Hollywood Handbook” podcast host Sean Clements, making his feature writing debut. You know where it’s going the minute Dusty Boyd (Johnson), working as a tennis coach at the elite racket club run by by his tough-as-nails dad Chuck (Ed Harris), bawls out senior-citizen pickleballer Candace (Steenburgen) when her errant ball lands on his court, venting his resentment of a sport he and his father see as beneath them.
Dusty has an awful lot of resentment to vent, in fact. A former teenage tennis prodigy who was aggressively coached by his dad to become a champion, he lost that dream to injury in a juniors match against Roddick years ago, and neither he nor the eternally unforgiving Chuck has ever got over the disappointment. These days, only the club’s awkward, unathletic Chinese-Australian underling PJ (Aaron Chen) looks up to him. A highly contrived scenario sees the club’s tennis and pickleball factions fighting for more court space, necessitating a deciding duel between their star players: Mortified not to be automatically picked by his father to represent their side, Dusty proves his mettle in a qualifying game, only for his old injury to flare up again.
His quirky physician (Stiller, burdened with a mirthless running joke about sex apps) suggests he take up pickleball while he recovers, which is how Dusty is improbably drafted into a league populated primarily with women of retirement age — including Candace, who graciously accepts him as her doubles partner. Naturally, he finds the sport more difficult than he expected, and eventually, as he gains in ability, more fun too. Where does this leave him regarding his loyalties to his father? Well, who cares? The stakes in “The Dink” never rise above the height of a pickleball net, and that extends to his burgeoning friendship with Candace, which he initially mistakes for a May-December (or perhaps closer to a June-November) attraction.
The growingly tender dynamic between between this cocky not-so-young buck and a careworn older woman is the most interesting thing “The Dink” has going for it, and could rewardingly be the focus of a less broad, more character-driven comedy. Instead, Greenbaum (“Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar”) and Clements skip around between a couple of shticky subplots and comic sideshows: Chen is the butt of the cheapest comedy here as a fawning, sexless lackey, while Harris, amusing in maximum gruff mode, is handed the most unconvicing redemption arc.
It’s an easy enough watch, though it never surpasses sitcom scale in tone or form: Greenbaum and editor Greg Hayden largely pass up the opportunity to make pickleball play either cinematically or comically in the match scenes. In fact, it’s tennis that gets the best joke here, in McEnroe’s self-aware parody of his own commentary style. It’s witty, but one can’t help feeling that “The Dink” needs bigger laughs, and bigger swings.
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