Sport comedies have a great history of anarchic energy; think Kingpin or Caddyshack or Happy Gilmore. Apple TV’s new film The Dink, however, takes a disappointingly gentler approach in depicting the gentle American sport of pickleball when it should, surely, be taking a wrecking ball to it.
Indeed, it is set up in this way, with a backstory about Dusty (Jake Johnson), once the bright young hope of tennis and nicknamed “The Hammer”, until an accident during a game with Andy Roddick ended his career while still in his teens. Now a middle-aged, mildly loser-ish coach working for his tennis club-owning father Chuck (Ed Harris), he winds up trying out pickleball as a break and finds fun, expression and nearromance with older woman Candace (Mary Steenburgen). This latter aspect is almost a refreshing flip of the usual older male actor/younger love interest dynamic (Johnson is 48, Steenburgen is 73), but as with everything here, it chooses a safe option over anything too outrageous — she rebuffs his crush, wanting him for a nice pickleball partner alone.
