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The Dink (PG, 102 mins)

Verdict: Thoroughly ace

Rating: Four out of five stars

Let me go out on a limb and declare Apple TV's The Dink to be the greatest pickleball comedy ever made.

As far as I'm aware it's also the only pickleball comedy ever made, but we mustn't get bogged down in analytics.

It's engagingly daft, even laugh-out-loud funny in places… and you can watch it at home.

Pickleball, for the uninitiated, is kind of tennis-lite, played with a plastic ball. In the United States it is much more popular than its more sophisticated cousin, padel; and in playing terms it's way more practical than tennis.

Four pickleball courts can fit into a single tennis court, and it's also easier. But its rapid spread (in the US there are an estimated 36 million players) is viewed by some tennis purists as an existential threat.

That's exactly the issue addressed, in pleasingly jaunty fashion, by The Dink (its title a reference to the strategy, like a drop-shot in tennis, of forcing your opponent back only to then feather the ball over the net).

Jake Johnson plays Dusty, a bumbling middle-aged tennis coach, whose boyhood aspirations to play at the highest level were shattered along with his wrist in an incident during a long-ago match against the rising Andy Roddick.

These days, Dusty only holds down a coaching position because he works at a swanky country club owned by his fierce, emotionally distant father Chuck (Ed Harris).

Jake Johnson as Dustin Boyd (left) and Ed Harris as Chuck Boyd (right)

Jake Johnson plays Dusty (right), a bumbling middle-aged tennis coach, whose boyhood aspirations to play at the highest level were shattered along with his wrist in an incident during a long-ago match against the rising Andy Roddick

When some members start agitating for more pickleball courts, Chuck is furious. 'Tennis is a living, breathing animal and she needs our protection,' he thunders.

Pickleball, he sneers, is 'the coronavirus of sports'.

A match is arranged to settle the matter, with the pickleballers putting up their champion against Chuck's.

It's a mini-version of the famous 1973 'Battle of the Sexes' between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King (which was itself dramatised in a pretty good 2017 film starring Steve Carell and Emma Stone).

Naturally, Dusty assumes that he will be his father's pick. But he is that stock character in American comedy films of this kind: an abject loser. His dad duly chooses someone else.

However, following a fatal accident caused by an angry owl (I said it was daft), Dusty winds up getting the gig.

Unfortunately, he then suffers another wrist injury, and the doctor (a cameo for one of the film's producers, Ben Stiller) goes and prescribes pickleball as the best way to get his strength back. You can doubtless see where this is heading.

Less predictably, there appears to be every chance of romance between Dusty and his much older pickleball partner Candace (Mary Steenburgen), although – if you'll forgive the spoiler – director Josh Greenbaum and writer Sean Clements sensibly choose to swerve any generation-gap sex.

For the record, Johnson is 48; Steenburgen is 73. Meanwhile, the narrative builds inexorably towards a pickleball showdown and Dusty's redemption.

Aaron Chen as PJ and Jake Johnson as Dustin Boyd

Roddick, playing himself, pops up again and so, in another delightfully silly cameo, does John McEnroe.

Mind you, I should also add that a fair few of the film's attempted gags land, as it were, beyond the baseline. For example, I was only fitfully amused by Dusty's adoring sidekick PJ (played by the Australian comedian Aaron Chen).

Maybe you need to be in a certain kind of mood to enjoy The Dink. But I was, and I did.

In some ways it reminded me of The Best Of Times, a 1986 American Football comedy starring Robin Williams and Kurt Russell, which wasn't for everyone and is now all-but forgotten, yet which I have always loved.

So I'm going out on that limb again. With or without killer owls, The Dink is a hoot.

The Dink is on Apple TV from Friday.

Also Showing

Good idea, but new Animal Farm for kids is wincingly twee

Hands up those who read George Orwell's Animal Farm at school. Most of us did, I'm sure, and if you were blessed with a good English teacher (as I was; thank you, Mr Wakefield), then Orwell's dystopian allegory, reflecting his deep disillusion with Stalinism, will remain vivid in the mind.

But our familiarity with Animal Farm, a sense almost of collective ownership, is not always a good thing for those who adapt it for the screen.

A considerable pile of critical manure was heaped on the last version, a 1999 TV film, and I fear the same fate awaits this week's release, an animation directed by Andy Serkis.

This is a shame. I'm a great admirer of Serkis, both as an actor and, having met him a couple of times, as a bloke. He's delightful.

And he has certainly assembled a first-class voice cast, including Seth Rogen (as the ruthless pig, Napoleon), Glenn Close, Kieran Culkin, Woody Harrelson, Steve Buscemi and Kathleen Turner. Moreover, aiming Orwell's story at younger children seems like a solid enough idea.

But Animal Farm: A Cautionary Tail (PG, 95 mins, one out of five stars), as its very sub-title hints, is disastrously twee and bland.

Animal Farm: A Cautionary Tail (PG, 95 mins, one out of five stars) , as its very sub-title hints, is disastrously twee and bland

A considerable pile of critical manure was heaped on the last version, a 1999 TV film, and I fear the same fate awaits this week's release, an animation directed by Andy Serkis, writes Viner

Furthermore, the animation is at best mediocre, and there's a wincingly happy ending that even Disney might have shied from.

Screenwriter Nicholas Stoller has a terrific set of credits, not least The Muppets (2011), but he and Serkis get this all wrong. A clunky flatulence gag says it all.

Pinocchio: Unstrung (18, 80 mins, three out of five stars) does the precise opposite, injecting a children's classic with loads of gruesome nastiness.

It's a slasher movie, basically; the fifth and best film in the so-called Twisted Childhood Universe which began with the ghastly Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood And Honey (2023).

This one has the same director, Rhys Frake-Waterfield, but here he does a decent job of tempering the horror with tongue-in-cheek comedy after Geppetto (played by horror veteran Richard Brake) carves a wooden puppet intended as a playmate for his orphaned grandson James (Cameron Bell).

Worryingly, this Pinocchio looks like a psycho and soon starts behaving like one, although the subsequent bloodbath might not surprise those of you who as kids were more than a little freaked out by the 1940 Disney film, as I was.

Finally, here's a perfectly safe school-holidays option for children: Chickenhare And The Secret Of The Groundhog (PG, 88 mins, three out of five stars).

It's a sequel, in case you hadn't guessed, to 2022's Chickenhare And The Hamster Of Darkness, and like Animal Farm it's full of anthropomorphised animals, in this case principally a chicken-hare hybrid, a skunk and a tortoise.

Together, the intrepid trio embark on a nutty adventure to find an ancient groundhog with a backwards-facing face, for reasons you probably don't need to know.

All these films are in cinemas now.