As Will Ferrell’s golf comedy “The Hawk” is playing to middling reviews over on Netflix, here comes Jake Johnson with his own goofball sports laugher in the superior “The Dink,” an Apple TV+ original from director Josh Greenbaum. The man behind Hulu’s funny “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar” and Netflix’s moving “Will & Harper” has produced another streaming original hit—he’s kinda becoming the king of unexpectedly good streaming flicks. Almost every issue that “The Dink” has with pacing—it’s about ten minutes longer than it should be—is overcome through the talent of its cast, most notably Johnson and Mary Steenburgen. Both underrated performers seem to be having so much fun together that it becomes contagious enough for the whole thing to work. It may not come out on top of any all-time sports comedy brackets, but it’s another one of those underdog stories that doesn’t have to be the champion to be a winner.
Johnson plays Dusty Boyd, a former child prodigy on the tennis circuit. With the help of his loyal assistant and only real friend PJ (Aaron Chen), Dusty is happy to tell the story of how he fell from glory during a match with Andy Roddick (who later shows up playing himself) in which the future champ allegedly created a spill in the bathroom. Dusty slipped and injured himself, derailing his career before it began. As PJ and Dusty tell it, all of Roddick’s future wins and his marriage to Brooklyn Decker were stolen from Boyd.
From the beginning, Dusty is one of those tortured sports comedy souls that people like Adam Sandler, Vince Vaughn and Will Ferrell have played before. Let’s just say that you don’t need to know that Ben Stiller produced it to think that a cameo by the “Dodgeball” star fits this tone perfectly. It has echoes of that film and a run of flicks by Ferrell like “Talladega Nights,” “Blades of Glory,” and “Semi-Pro” that arguably drove the “goofy old guy doing sports = funny” concept into the ground. Johnson has just the right mix of ego and vulnerability to pull it off, believable as a guy who blames everyone but himself for his failures, including his aggressively awful father Chuck (Ed Harris), who happens to own the club at which Dusty now works.
The current problem for the Boyds comes in the form of arguably the most popular growing sport in America: Pickleball. Being a tennis purist, Dusty can’t stand the sport, which makes its increasing presence at the club thoroughly aggravating. When it looks like pickleball will take courts from tennis, Chuck finds a by-law that reveals that such decisions can come down to a dual on the court but he doesn’t pick Dusty to be the standard bearer for the club, pushing his son to the evil empire of sport that includes a move called, you guessed it, “The Dink.”
While learning the ins and outs of Pickleball, Dusty gets closer to a Pickleball player named Candace, portrayed by the movie-stealing Steenburgen. The star of “Last Man on Earth” and “A Man on the Inside” has such perfect comic timing, which would be helpful enough, but she also digs deeper than many would into a script by Sean Clements that’s sometimes too content to go with the cliché. She’s so effortlessly charming that it’s entirely unsurprising when it looks like “The Dink” is going to become a May-December rom-com.
There are several bits in “The Dink” that flop—the aforementioned Stiller cameo being one—but they’re balanced by elements that land. None of the performers are bad; along with Johnson & Steenburgen’s fun chemistry, kudos as well to Harris for playing it completely straight and to consistently funny people like Patton Oswalt, Chloe Fineman, and Chris Parnell in the extended cast. The truth is that a likable ensemble of this caliber can go a long way to overcoming nitpicks about overly familiar sports comedy tropes and issues with pacing.
Greenbaum just finished directing the long-awaited “Spaceballs: The New One,” which is the kind of legacy sequel that one hopes will rekindle the humor of the original with significant worry that maybe that cultural window has closed. “The Dink” is funny enough to be optimistic.
On Apple TV+ on Friday.
