The Dink Review: ★★★½☆ (3.5/5)
The Dink is a genial, easy-going Apple TV+ sports comedy with a likeable cast and a promising father-son conflict at its centre, but it settles so comfortably into formula that most of its best comedic opportunities go unrealised — you can see where every beat is headed long before it arrives, and the film rarely does anything surprising enough to make you forget that. Worth watching for Jake Johnson’s charm and John McEnroe’s deadpan cameo, but it never quite earns the emotional payoff it reaches for.
Rating: ★★★½☆ (3.5/5)
Director: Josh Greenbaum
Platform: Apple TV+
Language: English
Cast: Jake Johnson, Ed Harris, Mary Steenburgen, Ben Stiller, Aaron Chen, Patton Oswalt, John McEnroe
Runtime: ~100 mins
Pickleball is having a moment. The sport — played on a smaller court with a paddle and a plastic ball, somewhere between tennis and ping pong in its aesthetic — has exploded in popularity across the United States in recent years, particularly among older adults looking for something competitive but less punishing on ageing joints.
It has also become a reliable cultural shorthand for everything the traditional tennis establishment finds vaguely threatening. The Dink, streaming now on Apple TV+, understands that cultural shorthand and builds its entire premise around the conflict between these two sporting worlds.
Jake Johnson plays Dusty Boyd, a man whose promising tennis career was derailed years ago by a wrist injury and a humiliating defeat against then-rising star Andy Roddick. Now middle-aged, he works as an instructor at his father Chuck’s tennis club — played by Ed Harris with the understated authority of a man who has spent decades being disappointed without ever quite saying it out loud.
When a growing pickleball community starts encroaching on the club’s courts, Chuck decides the conflict should be settled by a winner-take-all match. The problem: he does not want Dusty representing tennis, because he does not trust him to win.
That is the emotional core of the film, and when the movie stays close to it, it works. The relationship between a son who has spent his entire life seeking his father’s approval and a father who withholds it not out of cruelty but out of the particular stubbornness of men who do not know how else to love — that is genuinely interesting territory, and Harris and Johnson do real work with it in their shared scenes.
A moment where Dusty watches old footage of his actual match against Roddick and silently tries not to cry is the film’s best scene, and it hints at a more emotionally ambitious version of this story that the screenplay does not quite pursue.
Jake Johnson is the reason to watch. He makes Dusty — a character who could easily tip into outright unlikeability given his arrogance and self-pity — someone you keep rooting for despite yourself.
Mary Steenburgen as Candace, the older pickleball enthusiast who introduces Dusty to the sport he initially dismisses, brings warmth and a dry humour that makes their unlikely friendship the film’s most natural relationship.
John McEnroe’s cameo as himself, delivering deadpan commentary with all the simmering contempt of a man who has always been right about everything, is the film’s funniest sustained performance. Ben Stiller appears briefly as an eccentric doctor and is largely wasted.
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The comedy is the film’s weakest element, which is a significant problem for a film that is primarily a comedy. Too much of it relies on the basic contrast between tennis elitism and pickleball enthusiasm without pushing that contrast anywhere genuinely surprising.
The screenplay signals its every twist well in advance. The climax, when it arrives, is entertaining enough but feels like a requirement fulfilled rather than a destination earned.
Pleasant, watchable, and quickly forgotten.
The Dink is now streaming on Apple TV+.