The pressure to deliver a good comedy movie if you were involved with a previous classic must be quite something. Ben Stiller knows that better than most – he was the face of some iconic comedies in the 1990s and 2000s, but now is generally associated with more serious fare like Severance. His new movie for Apple TV, though, suggests that he's going back to the old ways, at least temporarily.
The Dink stars Jake Johnson of New Girl fame (or, at least, that's where I know and love him from), in a sports-themed comedy movie that not only calls Dodgeball to mind, but in fact deliberately invokes that genre classic in its trailer. The film will hit Apple TV on 24 July, making it a potential summer crowd-pleaser.
To be honest, the trailer actually makes the movie look like the sort of thing that Netflix normally pumps out – low-quality fare that nonetheless will do big numbers because people undeniably do love an easy watch on a summer evening. That might be me doing it a disservice, though, and Stiller has clearly shown that he can create a properly interesting project.
He's producing the movie this time, but he also cameos in the trailer. He's a doctor who tells Johnson's character Dusty, a past-his-prime tennis semi-pro, that the best way to rehabilitate an injured wrist is to swap to pickleball. Dusty just so happens to despise the sport as a bastardised version of tennis for the old and weak, but perhaps being forced to play it could change his mind?
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to estimate how the movie might unfold from this premise, with Dusty coming to grudgingly love the pickleball community he's been vilifying for so long, before realising that he could be a way bigger star in this nascent sport than he ever was in tennis. Sprinkled along the way are some other fun cameos, not least from Andy Roddick – and Ed Harris seems to have been roped in as a fuddy-duddy tennis defender.
The Dink looks like a movie that might divide audiences. If you know ahead of time that it's not shooting for the moon, it could end up being a really fun and self-contained little oasis of amusement during what'll probably be a hot and sticky late July. If you don't, then it might disappoint – but we'll get a better sense of that risk when it comes out in around a month's time.
