Tennis, Anyone?

Directed by Donal Logue

RIA Productions

2 stars



In “Tennis, Anyone?” director/co-writer/co-star Donal Logue (TV’s “Grounded for Life”) serves up a remarkably unimaginative and disjointed clone of last year’s midlife-crisis buddy hit, “Sideways.” Logue opens his debut with a white Chevy, blurred by heat, slowly making its way across the southern California desert towards the camera—emblematic of “Tennis”’s 100-minute crawl across the screen.

Inside the Chevy are Donal Logue’s Danny Macklin and co-writer Kirk Fox’s Gary Morgan, the unlikable central players of “Tennis.” Gary and Danny are acting buddies who meet on the set of a low-budget Indie film set in California—art imitating life, one assumes.

What makes “Tennis, Anyone?” so vapid is its formulaic false dilemma. After shooting the film, the friends promise to call each other; the viewer is immediately shown a giant “One year later” inter-title. At a party, they discover their mutual love of tennis, and end up playing in a series of charity tournaments. But between tournaments, Danny somehow manages to lose his gig on a TV show; Gary never really has a job, and handles his unemployment with a kind of eastern “guru-ness” reminiscent of Thomas Haden Church’s well-meaning sidekick character in “Sideways.”

Despite its flaws, “Tennis, Anyone?” does have some very clever moments. Maeve Quinlan’s Siobhan Kelly, the celebrity interviewer for The Tennis Channel, provides an avenue for Logue and Fox to poke ribald fun at the culture at “Charity Classics.” She interviews screaming, enthusiastic celebrities of all sorts, including an uproariously funny rapper who tells the camera with a straight face, “this is how we do shit.”

Bringing in ESPN’s real-life tennis analyst, Luke Jensen, to portray Luke Dorkovich, an over-the-hill player who takes Ecstasy to improve his serve, is a deft touch. Jason Issacs (Lucius Malfoy in “Harry Potter”) also provides a fine caricature as the scheming nemesis, whose uses his fame to trick Logue’s Macklin into losing his job. As per the formula, Issac’s Johnnie Green and his Derek Lowe look-alike sidekick, Nick Allen, haunt the tennis circuit and play our heroes in the finals…which, of course, goes down to the final point. I won’t “spoil” the ending by giving it away.

These highlights are not enough to interest the audience in the characters. The trite construction of “self-centered man has mid-life crisis/man hits road with slightly less narcissistic buddy/man gets life back on track after epiphany” has been fully explored, most recently by “Sideways,” and “Tennis” adds nothing to the genre. While “Tennis” attempts to be a feel-good affirmation with substance and humor, the writing isn’t clever enough and the sentiment is empty.

If Logue had made the audience rally behind his out-of-luck losers, the film might have been a worthy fusion of the feel-good sports comedy and buddy genres. Instead, “Tennis, Anyone?” makes one hope this is game, set, match for Logue’s directorial career.