Jake Johnson stars as delusional ex-tennis player Dusty, nicknamed The Hammer, in an engagingly silly sports comedy about the world of pickleball and its supposed threat to tennis. After an injury forces him to switch to the sport he loathes, he ends up confronting both his own failures and his assumptions about the game.
How does the film set up Dusty’s resentment?
Dusty is a middle-aged loser whose delusionally macho nickname, The Hammer, masks a long history of disappointment. He once showed early promise at tennis before being crushed by a humiliating teenage encounter with the young
playing himself in cameo. Now he coaches at the tennis club owned by his father, played by Ed Harris, who is scowlingly contemptuous of everything Dusty says and does.
For Dusty, the one thing that allows him to reclaim his self-respect as a man and a tennis player is his utter loathing for pickleball, a game he sees as an infantilising, dumbed-down version of tennis. The club grudgingly allows pickleball followers one of their toytown mini-courts, and Dusty duly gets a meet-cute quarrel with Candace, played by Mary Steenburgen, a pickleball enthusiast.
Why does Dusty take up pickleball?
Dusty’s doctor, played by Ben Stiller, recommends pickleball as the best way to recover from a wrist injury, and the injury itself becomes the pretext for a mountain of
jerking offgags. Once he starts playing, Dusty discovers that he kind of likes the noble art, with its slower, more thoughtful pace and its prominent role for the humble
dinkdrop shot. He also more than likes Candace, although the film flinches from the reality of an age-gap relationship.
Who appears in the supporting cast?
The film includes a funny walk-on from a tennis great, who appears as himself and commentates with baffling intensity on the climactic on-court confrontation between Dusty and his nemesis Roddick. There is also strong support from Australian comic Aaron Chen as Dusty’s cringingly submissive beta-male wingman PJ, and from Patton Oswalt as the pickleball partisan Slip.
30 Rock fans, however, may feel the film has given a pretty meagre role to Chris Parnell, best known as Dr Spaceman in Tina Fey’s TV comedy classic. Even so, the film’s performances and its broadly absurd premise help sustain its playful tone throughout.
