When announced, there was a concern that The Dink was coming several years too late. It has cooled off significantly, but there was a very real Tennis vs. Pickleball battle raging just a few years ago. As a lifelong tennis player, and someone who has friends who teach and coach tennis, I had a front row seat to a lot of this. In both public access and private clubs, tennis courts were being removed to make room for pickleball.
There were the very real noise complaints (If you’ve ever played tennis on an indoor court next to four pickleball courts, you know how maddening it can be.), concerns that pickleball was simply a fad and all the costs for the new pickleball courts would end up wasted. Those were some of the more valid complaints. Then there was the less serious that pickleball was simply a joke (“So it’s like tennis, but easy,” as Andy Roddick says in this Apple TV original).
While the entire situation felt ripe for a series or movie, coming so late after the bulk of the controversy caused some worry that it would feel outdated and out of touch. But taking a more a focused approach – the events concern only one club – and adding some unexpected heart, The Dink is a success.
What is The Dink about?
Mary Steenburgen and Jake Johnson in The Dink/Apple TV
Aaron Chen and Jake Johnson in The Dink/Apple TV
Chloe Fineman and Jake Johnson in The Dink/Apple TV
Jake Johnson and Ben Stiller in The Dink/Apple TV
Washed-up former tennis prodigy Dusty Boyd (Jake Johnson) has seen his professional dreams shattered, reducing his tennis career to teaching kids at a posh country club. It doesn’t help that his father, Chuck (Ed Harris), whose respect he was never quite able to earn, is his boss. Still desperate for Chuck’s approval, Dusty supports his vendetta against the ever-growing-in-popularity pickleball. When Dusty reaggravates an old injury, he resorts to pickleball as rehab. To his surprise, he likes it, putting him on an unexpected collision course with Chuck, with the club’s racket sports future hanging in the balance.
The Dink review
It would have been very easy to make The Dink nothing more than a silly class comedy: the stuffy elites (tennis) vs the common folk (pickleball). (Okay, sure, everyone here is a member at a country club. They could all be stuffy elites, but I digress.) Now let’s not get confused here. This is a very silly movie. You cast Jake Johnson in your lead role, you’re getting silliness and antics all over the place. But director Josh Greenbaum and screenwriter Sean Clements saw an opportunity to add a touch of depth to a movie where the general audience might not be expecting it, and it’s better off for it.
Putting the focus on just the one country club allows the characters more time to flourish. It doesn’t matter what other clubs or public parks are doing. Greenbaum and Clements made it more a journey of finding oneself, rather than a broad question of “Is more pickleball a good or bad thing?” And a lot of the credit for that working as well as it does goes to Mary Steenburgen’s character.
She plays Candace, Dusty’s eventual pickleball partner. She is divorced and still navigating newly single life. Like Dusty, she’s not sure who she is right now either. And while Steenburgen is a gifted comedic actress in her own right, her role in The Dink is that of the straight woman to Johnson’s eccentric, erratic Dusty.
Candace is really what grounds the movie, preventing it from veering off course into full-on kookiness. Dusty and Candace form an odd couple-esque friendship. They are very different people who happen to be going through similar internal struggles. They are able to rely on each other’s different life experiences to help each other come through stronger on the other side.
Andy Roddick in The Dink/Apple TV
The rest of the supporting cast is strong too, highlighted by Aaron Chen as PJ. PJ works at the country club and is Dusty’s loyal-to-a-fault sidekick and best friend. PJ is a bit of an odd duck, and gets some of the movie’s funniest bits. Ben Stiller is great in a small role as Dusty’s doctor. The rest of the cast is littered with comedy heavy-hitters. Patton Oswalt, Chloe Fineman, Chris Parnell, Cleo King, Lynne Marie Stewart, Lennon Parham. All (especially Stewart and King) have scene-stealing moments. Ed Harris is good, because he’s Ed Harris. But his character is surprisingly one of the weaker parts. He’s essentially nothing more than a stereotypical strict, no-nonsense, hard-to-please father.
Andy Roddick is honestly terrific. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here and say this is going to launch an illustrious acting career. But he was allowed to basically play a jerkier version of himself. And throughout his career, and now as an analyst and podcast host, he’s always been good in front of a camera. He wasn’t asked to do too much, and the script played perfectly to his strengths.
If you’re worried about The Dink being too “inside pickleball,” you can drop forget that. It doesn’t get too much into the rules and strategy, which is a good thing. It’s not that the sport is complicated, but it would ensure some clunky exposition to really get into it. The “kitchen” rule, for example, is not a hard rule to understand. But it takes a lot of words to explain it.
But because The Dink is not really a pickleball movie, it can get away with going lighter on the nuances of the sport. And that allows it to focus on what it actually wants to say. No matter how old you are, or what stage of life you’re in, sometimes you’re still in the process of finding yourself. And sometimes as situations change, you need to allow yourself the grace to change along with them. Just because you thought or acted one way for years or decades before, it doesn’t mean you have to keep those thoughts and actions if you’ve found a better way.
Is The Dink worth watching?
Jake Johnson and Ed Harris in The Dink/Apple TV
The Dink is a comedy for everyone. It’s a showcase for a lot of very funny actors given the chance to be very funny in a goofy comedy with surprisingly resonant themes and positive messaging. It never gets too in-depth with them, but at the end of the day, its main goal is to make you laugh. And if it can do that, while also giving you something to think about when the credits roll, then that’s just all the better.
The Dink will be available to stream on Apple TV on Friday, July 24.
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