Semi-Pro: A Review by Logan Doe
Over three consecutive years, Will Ferrell has released three comedies devoted each to a specific professional sport: Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (NASCAR racing), Blades of Glory (ice skating), and now Semi-Pro, chronicling the misadventures of Jackie Moon (Ferrell) and the Tropics, the worst team in the American Basketball Association.
It’s 1976, and plans are announced by the ABA commissioner to dissolve (“a real word”) the association with the four best teams earning their way into the NBA. Moon, player and manager of the Tropics, sets out to get his team that prestigious fourth slot by creating increasingly bizarre promotions to lure in the public to compensate for his team’s unfortunate lack of ability to play well. Until Ed Monix (Woody Harrelson), a player with an impaired reputation, shows up to get the team into tiptop condition.
Ferrell’s got his work cut out for him in convincing people that he can still do this same schtick and maintain his ability to make people laugh. It doesn’t entirely fly. Ferrell’s best comedic moments tend to come out of quiet situations, putting him in a position where it’s him and only him. No one playing off of him, no score, nothing driving the plot forward – just Ferrell and his words. The laughs come from his personality and the balance he strikes between being very laidback and cool about any given moment and, the next minute, being aggressively loud and blatantly opinionated about that same meaningless thing. That’s why Saturday Night Live worked so well for him.
In Semi-Pro, Ferrell has very few opportunities to speak about anything on his own terms. That’s why films are such a mixed bag for him. He needs a script that plays to his strengths and give him plenty of room to improvise….unless the old boy’s getting tired. Either way, he’s got to find some fresher material than this. Stranger Than Fiction came out a couple years ago: it was original, it depended on Ferrell’s unique comedic fortitude for it to reach mass audiences, it completely worked…and yet it went largely unseen and not favored by Ferrell’s core fanbase (frat guys, manboys in their early 20s who’ve seen Old School a few too many times).
The supporting cast isn’t shabby: Harrelson (recently seen in 2007’s Best Picture, No Country For Old Men) plays the new player-turned-coach of the Tropics, it’s nice to see him in a slapstick comedy again – 1996’s Kingpin was criminally unnoticed. Will Arnett, he of Arrested Development excellence, plays a smokey, constantly buzzed basketball announcer who gets most of the film’s best lines. Jackie Earle Haley even shows up as a dirty, cheated hippie.
When all’s said and done, Semi-Pro feels too formulaic for it to be effective as a legitimate Ferrell comedy. Or any kind of comedy really. Its laughs (there are afew) are too few and far between, its attempts at spontaneous humor are slim, it’s rarely clever, and unlike Ferrell’s previous two sports efforts, basketball comedies are not unheard of, therefore it has more to live up to.
-- Logan Doe
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