The Dink review – pickleball comedy serves up engagingly silly laughs

There’s some funny stuff here in this engagingly silly sports comedy from producer-star Jake Johnson about the world of pickleball, and how this (allegedly) facile pseudo-tennis game for children and old people threatens to infantilise and dumb down the world of tennis itself.

Dusty (Johnson) is a middle-aged loser, delusionally nicknamed The Hammer, who once showed early promise at tennis before getting crushed by a humiliating teen encounter with the young Andy Roddick (playing himself in cameo). These days Dusty coaches at the tennis club owned by his dad (Ed Harris), who is scowlingly contemptuous of everything Dusty says and does. Only one thing allows poor Dusty to reclaim his self-respect as a man and a tennis player: his utter loathing for pickleball, whose followers are grudgingly permitted one of their toytown mini-courts at the club – and he duly gets a meet-cute quarrel with pickleball enthusiast Candace (Mary Steenburgen).

But Dusty’s doctor (Ben Stiller) recommends pickleball as the best way to recover from a wrist injury, itself the pretext for a mountain of “jerking off” gags, and he discovers that he kind of likes the noble art, with its slower, more thoughtful pace and its prominent role for the humble “dink” drop shot. And he more than likes Candace as well … although the film flinches from the reality of an age-gap relationship.

Inevitably for any comedy about tennis, John McEnroe has a funny walk-on, playing himself and commentating with baffling intensity on the climactic on-court confrontation between Dusty and his nemesis Roddick. There is nice support from Australian comic Aaron Chen as Dusty’s cringingly submissive beta-male wingman PJ, as well as from Patton Oswalt as the pickleball partisan Slip – although 30 Rock fans will consider the film has supplied a pretty meagre role for Chris Parnell, the great Dr Spaceman in Tina Fey’s TV comedy classic.