A fleet-footed, featherweight comedy riddled with cliches, but nonetheless charming and winning.
Comment
09/04/08
Ping Pong Playa (2007)
66
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:32
Fresh:21
Rotten:11
Average Rating:5.9/10
Consensus: A gentle, light, kid friendly comedy about a Chinese-American hoopster turned ping pong pro, Playa is a charming but considerable digression from director Jessica Yu's previous works.
Reviews for Ping Pong Playa
If you go into Ping Pong Playa' expecting a light, predictable comedy, it would be hard to come out unsatisfied.
09/29/08
One way to break down cultural walls is assimilation, and that's where Ping Pong Playa has its dubious triumph: it's just about as generic as the next 'loser makes good by coaching kids' comedy...[Blu-ray]
02/15/09
An endless stream of near-misses.
01/16/09
A good, clean, fun comedy that uses a table tennis championship to crack inside jokes about Los Angeles' Chinese-American community.
09/03/08
Top CriticDull, predictable and unoriginal ... the main character is so annoyingly silly it's hard to put up with him for an entire movie.
09/02/08
[W]hen the characters are this charming and the dialogue is this smart, you won't mind watching a little white ball clonk its way from paddle to tabletop and back again.
09/02/08
Charming despite requisite training sequences and a cartoonishly evil opponent.
10/18/08
Ping Pong Playa falters on formula only occasionally, but otherwise remains a consistently agreeable romp that strikes just the right chord of ironic sentimentally.
09/12/08
Mostly a little shrewder about stereotypes than your typical slacker comedy, deriving its edge from Yu and Tsai's mining of the cultural specificity of Asian-America for laughs
08/08/09
Very broad humor and sloppy storytelling pave the way to a requisite Rocky ending.
09/05/08
This thin premise can't sustain a feature, and the racial and gay jokes are jarring, but the child actors are cute.
09/03/08
The setup has been trotted out a million times before, and the movie’s novel SoCal Chinese-American milieu only partially excuses the familiarity.
09/04/08
A mostly amusing, appealing family comedy about going from pretender to contender, in life as well as pingpong.
09/05/08
To be perfectly blunt, Ping Pong Playa is third-rate crap. Unfunny crap. Unnecessary crap. This little entertainment is also unintentionally racist, misogynistic, homophobic, poorly acted, and shapeless.
09/04/08
This lighter-than-air comedy couldn't be more different from director Jessica Yu's previous entry, 'Protagonist.'
07/24/08
Ace documentarian Jessica Yu's fictional feature debut ... is mostly funny and often cute, but it suffers a bit in comparison to the very similar Foot Fist Way ...
11/12/08
There's a deeper, touching acknowledgment of braggadocio as persona, how the commodified dissent of hip-hop lends itself to masking insecurities.
09/05/08
Top CriticThe movie doesn't take its broad, jokey premise terribly far, but it manages to sustain a goofy-sweet comic energy and offers sly observations about assimilation, sibling rivalry and the art of competitive maternal bragging.
09/05/08
Top CriticA winning comedy that entertainingly elevates a low-profile sport.
09/03/08
Top CriticLatest News for Ping Pong Playa
September 04, 2008:
Box Office Guru Preview: Cage Offers One Night in Bangkok
Multiplexes will be filled this weekend...with tumbleweeds. The frame after the Labor Day holiday is often the worst-performing session of the whole year at the box office and... More...
September 03, 2008:
RT Exclusive: Ping Pong Playa featurette!
Ping pong. Has its time come at last? The sport's been getting more and more attention from the movies, the latest arriving in the form of Ping Pong Playa. Rotten Tomatoes has... More...
July 20, 2008:
Trailer & Poster review 
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