Ping Pong Playa

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

Charming despite requisite training sequences and a cartoonishly evil opponent.

Ping Pong Playa falters on formula only occasionally, but otherwise remains a consistently agreeable romp that strikes just the right chord of ironic sentimentally.

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]