Leading things is Johnson, who finally gets the perfect starring role for his raspy-voiced charms and overworked confidence. He anchors The Dink with his off-the-cuff style and Ricky Bobby’s dickhead arrogance. The washed-up wunderkind is so desperate for a win he’s game to debase himself with pickleball, a sport he expects to master without trying. In fact, once he meets Candace (Mary Steenburgen), he realizes that he’s actually trying too hard. Matching the film’s energy, it’s when he learns to take lighter swings that he can dink his way to victory. Like most great sports comedies, The Dink is a team effort: Dusty and Candace make a compelling double, with the latter helping to soften The Hammer, who’s too thirsty for dad’s approval via a tennis duel that pits tennis snobs against over-the-hill pickleball slobs.
To namecheck another Sandler comedy, the plot of The Dink has a Billy Madison temperament, setting up a largely unrealistic premise without needing to justify it too much. The rulebook always seems to have some convenient bylaw to clear the way for a new contrivance. In this case, it allows for a tennis duel to determine whether Chuck—played perfectly by a stone-faced Harris, who, like Hot Rod‘s Ian McShane, too rarely gets the opportunity to comedically weaponize his threatening gravitas—will renovate the pickleball or tennis courts. Like sending Billy back to school for two weeks per grade, Clements’ script uses the plot’s absurdity to move the story along, but he also allows it to fade into the background as Candace draws Dusty out of his shell.
Along the way, there are drawbacks to its lessened scale. The visual inventiveness that Greenbaum brought to Barb And Star is largely absent, with The Dink keeping its aims far below Challengers‘ kineticism. The film often relies on ho-hum shot-reverse-shot two-person scenes that cry out for distinction. Still, Johnson and Steenburgen have a warm chemistry that flirts with but rejects romance in favor of friendship. It does so smartly, acknowledging that there’s no way for Dusty to spend that much time with Candace without catching feelings. By skirting the May-December of it all, The Dink lands in a lighthearted, family-friendly zone, without the desperate suburban pandering of something like The Breadwinner. That’s all the more impressive considering it’s a pickleball comedy, set at a country club, that’s, in part, about a man learning to love country music.
If there’s a major fault to this largely winning 102-minute comedy, it’s that it’s sequestered on streaming, where it seems destined to disappear. Without a CGI-laden action set piece or criminal subplot to speak of, movies like The Dink default to the small screen. All the tricks that goosed up comedy budgets into four-quadrant multiplex fillers in the 2010s are absent. There’s no parade of celebrity cameos or overstaged pratfalls, just well-defined characters, leisurely pickleball action, and enthusiastic performances that hit hard with light taps.
Director: Josh Greenbaum
Writer: Sean Clements
Starring: Jake Johnson, Ben Stiller, Chloe Fineman, Christine Taylor, Patton Oswalt, Martin Kove, Mary Steenburgen, Ed Harris, Andy Roddick, John McEnroe
Release Date: July 24, 2026 (Apple TV)
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