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While sports comedies have never really gone out of style, they're certainly having a moment – though not necessarily a good one. Just last week, comedy icon Will Ferrell rolled out his new Netflix series The Hawk, in which he plays a pro golfer who is trying to achieve his former glory. Unfortunately, while Ferrell is funny, The Hawk is not. Sadly, Apple TV's newest entry into the genre may be close behind.
It isn't a great sign that The Dink has a very similar premise to both The Hawk and Owen Wilson's much better 2025 golfer series Stick (as well as innumerable sports comedies before them). Main character Dustin Boyd (Jake Johnson) is a washed-up pro athlete, in this case a former tennis player, who is determined to make something of himself despite his past failures. The Dink does at least give audiences the added detail that he is desperate to regain his father's respect after choking on the tennis court. For Dustin, redemption looks like trying his hand at pickleball rather than attempting a full-fledged return to tennis.
Along the way, he meets Mary Steenburgen's character, Candace, and surprises himself by catching feelings for her. What follows is a woefully predictable plot that crawls forward in a monotone, with even the stakes that the movie sets up as theoretically important falling flat. That would be tragic in and of itself, but the movie's talented cast makes it much more so. They had every opportunity to shine, if only they had been given more than just a plug-and-play script, suitable for any sports comedy.
The Dink Isn't Egregious – It's Just Totally Uninteresting
If director Josh Greenbaum and screenwriter Sean Clements were aiming for "not horrible," they have technically hit the mark, if only because The Dink is almost too boring to be bad. From the beginning, Dustin feels like a caricature of a sports comedy protagonist – right down to his nickname, Dusty – as though he was plucked out of the countless, nearly indistinguishable examples of the '90s and plopped into this one. His motivations are mostly shallow; his personal relationships, romantic and otherwise, feel distinctly unidirectional (towards him); and his jokes are frequently just not funny.
The last is perhaps the most frustrating, because it means The Dink wasted a brilliant actor who absolutely deserves a leading role in a comedy. Audiences will likely know Johnson best as Nick Miller from New Girl, in which he played protagonist Jess's roommate and, eventually, romantic partner. Fans of New Girl will also know that Johnson was absolutely hilarious, managing to make Nick not only one of the funniest characters but also, in many ways, the emotional heart of the series. The Dink has somehow bungled that natural wit and charm.
Johnson is far from the only actor who gets burned by The Dink. Joining Johnson and Steenburgen in this A-list cast are Ed Harris, Ben Stiller, Chloe Fineman, Patton Oswalt, Chris Parnell, and others. There's little question that The Dink should have been absolute comedy gold with a lineup like this. Instead, the humor, too, seems pillaged from the '90s. At one point, there is a joke about the Menendez brothers that was so shockingly tasteless I actually ran the scene back to make sure I'd heard it correctly.
Seriously, the '90s are calling: They want their clichés back.
Additionally, and rather archaically, a significant part of the plot centers on Johnson's Dustin developing feelings for Steenburgen's Candace, which, at least some of the time, the film positions as a joke because of her age. The actors themselves are about 25 years apart, and while that would obviously be a large age gap, it almost goes without saying that a movie would be much less likely to frame a younger woman having feelings for a much older man as ludicrous or, perhaps worse, funny.
The Dink even doubles down on that by playing Candace's rejection of Dustin, and revelation that she isn't physically attracted to him, for a laugh – as though, because she's an older woman, it's absurd that she's the one to not find him attractive. For a comedy in 2026, that isn't exactly breaking new ground.
What's more, if you took a look at the cast list and noticed a stark lack of diversity, you're not missing something. Star-studded though it may be, The Dink'scast is almost entirely white. The very few BIPOC actors who do have named roles, such as Aaron Chen, are relegated to largely one-dimensional, best friend stereotypes. Seriously, the '90s are calling: They want their clichés back.
Perhaps the only time The Dink truly drew my attention was when Candace and Dustin were flaunting their (seeming) relationship in front of Candace's ex and the woman for whom he left her, which was the most personality either character ever showed. But even that was short-lived, and swiftly followed by the reveal that Candace didn't actually like Dustin. In the end, The Dink failed to do anything new, kept the stakes mind-bogglingly low, and managed to make a number of insulting choices along the way.
The Dink is available to stream on Apple TV from Friday, July 24.
