Ping Pong Playa (2007) - A Review

 

Ping Pong Playa is quite the hilarious movie!

Ping Pong Playa is a sports comedy movie released in the United States in 2007 and stars Jimmy Tsai, Khary Payton, Andrew Vo, Jim Lau, Elizabeth Sung, Roger Fan, Kevin Chung, Javin Reid, Smith Cho, Peter Paige, Scott Lowell, and Stephnie Weir. The movie was co-written by Jessica Yu with Jimmy Tsai, and directed by Jessica Yu.

Jimmy Tsai plays C-Dub (Chris Wang). Dude can talk some trash!

In Ping Pong Playa, Jimmy Tsai plays Christopher Wang (though he prefers to go by C-Dub), a young man in his twenties who still lives at home with his parents. His dream is to become a big time NBA (basketball) player. He thinks very highly of his skills and routinely beats little kids in basketball games at the park. His friend, JP Money (played by Khary Payton) has more ambitious goals and is working toward them (he is even studying how to speak Chinese). JP likes and believes in Chris, but he feels Chris needs to realize where his basketball skills are actually at.

When Chris's brother, Michael (played by Roger Fan)  and mom (played by Elizabeth Sung) get injured in a minor car accident, he has to take over teaching his mom's ping pong class. Being a slacker, Chris does not take this very seriously, but the young students Felix (played by Andrew Vo), William (played by Kevin Chung), and Prabaka (played by Javin Reid) really look up to him. It turns out that the annual ping pong tournament is coming up, and Chris's parents want him to enter it. The tournament is how Chris's parents make their money: Michael enters and wins the tournament, which makes people want to learn how to play ping pong from the tournament winner's mother and buy sports goods at the tournament winner's father's store. Chris is really not into this, until some racist ping pong players (played by Peter Paige and Scott Lowell) entered in the tournament start trying to steal the ping pong students from his mom's class. Chris begins to take things seriously and trains with his father (played by Jim Lau) and his ping pong students to get ready. Can Chris get serious enough about his future and win the tournament?

C-Dub is a hero to his ping pong class.

Ping Pong Playa is a really funny sports movie! Though this is basically a family comedy, there is a bit of an edge to it (profanity is censored using funny sound effects, though). Chris is a guy that talks like a gangsta and doesn't really take anything seriously. He has no pressing motivation, though he wants to become a famous NBA player, and wants to get with Felix's older sister, Jennifer (played by the incredible Smith Cho). Even though he is kind of a jerk, he is still very likeable. Jimmy Tsai kills it in this role. When Chris realizes the stakes at hand and starts taking things seriously, you root him on. He comes to find out that being in this tournament is all about him and how he handles things, not about winning. There is a lot of funny shenanigans in this, and the little kids in this movie are great. In fact, all the actors in this movie are great. Though the story might be a little cliched, it is still really fun and entertaining to go through.

C-Dub is quite good at ping pong!

I highly recommend watching Ping Pong Playa. It is a slice of life sports comedy showing the life of an Asian-American man in his 20s living in southern California in the late 2000s. The movie is very funny without being offensive or corny. This is a pretty good movie for the whole family, but there are some edgy jokes in here. The actors are great, the story is interesting, it's actually funny, and the whole movie is entertaining. What more could you want? Check Ping Pong Playa out, it's really underrated and it's really good!

Reviewed by David Williams