'Tennis' serves up satire but misses the mark
By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff | December 9, 2005
Donal Logue has enjoyed a pretty decent career playing smallish parts in smallish movies. Earlier this year he stole a couple scenes in the romantic comedy ''Just Like Heaven." (It was petty theft, but his services were appreciated.) Logue's career took a turn in 2000 when he played an overweight rake in ''The Tao of Steve," a no-budget film that won him a special acting prize at the Sundance Film Festival. He seemed headed onward and upward in the movies. But he went in another direction, starring as the hapless dad on ''Grounded for Life," a mediocre sitcom that aired on Fox, then the WB, and was canceled this year.
Logue explains his possible rationale (it pays well) for taking the TV job in ''Tennis, Anyone. . .?," the banal movie he's directed and cowritten that's basically about him. He plays Danny Macklin, an actor of minor success who drifts haplessly through a series of incriminating incidents that land him in hot water with the producers of the family sitcom he's on. He performs a stand-up routine at a charity dinner dressed as an Afghani. He suffers a kick to the face while visiting a strip club. These aren't Danny's ideas. Logue has written and played the character as gullible. We're supposed to be sympathetic to Danny's lack of assertiveness.
Logue, who wrote the film with Kirk Fox, stacks the deck in Danny's favor. He's the least-foul person in the movie. His pregnant Australian wife is a shrew who leaves him for another man. His best friend, Gary (Fox), is a washed-up tennis pro who wants to act and has dubious faux-Zen mottos and advice for Danny. His archenemy is an obnoxious American actor who the Englishman Jason Isaacs plays far too well. Isaacs is so nasty you want to keep watching to see what kind of comeuppance the movie has waiting for him.
The film's only stroke of inspiration is to situate the film in and around Los Angeles's pro-celebrity tennis circuit, where Danny and Gary compete as a doubles team. Here, Logue and Fox might have found a setting and environment worth sending up. But the movie is such an unrepentant exercise in navel-gazing that its makers never look up to see the satire they might be on to.
Logue and Fox enjoy a low-rent Wilson-brothers type of rapport, and the movie itself has the easy, swinging style that cropped up all the time in minor 1970s movies -- or at Sundance recently. You can imagine Peter Fonda or Terence Stamp carrying on in a similar picture. You can also see a sort of ''Sideways" for loser narcissists taking shape. But ''Tennis, Anyone. . .?" squanders any opportunity to sneak in commentary or a point of view that we haven't already seen in any other actor's self-centered forays into directing. Danny just wants to be loved, and many of Logue's friends probably will dig this movie. The rest of us might have a tough time being tickled by it. Logue's backhand, however, is very good.
http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/article ... _the_mark/
Boston Globe lukewarm on "Tennis", loved JI
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