Never let it be said that Will Ferrell selects difficult targets to satirize. Bored husbands, 1970’s anchormen, and NASCAR drivers are his bread and butter, spectacularly over the top white males his specialty. "Semi-Pro" adds 1970’s basketball team owners to the mix, and he approaches the role with the same goofy bravado he applies to the more macho careers.
To my regular readers: does the above paragraph look familiar? Perhaps it should, because I copied and pasted it from my 2007 review of “Blades of Glory,” only I updated the title and the character Ferrell plays. At first I began to write something just like it, only to realize that I already had. Some things never change, at least not until the grosses go down.
That said, at least “Blades of Glory” was funny, a farce with wise casting and inspired playing of obvious gags. “Semi-Pro’s” point of ridicule, the defunct American Basketball Association, went out of business in 1976, implying that it wasn’t all that popular even back then. Given the weak material, and that Ferrell has lampooned the 1970’s before, “Semi-Pro” feels quasi-desperate, the film desperately searching for laughs and memorable gags where there are very few to be found.
Of course, the film rides on Ferrell’s ability to shout non sequiturs and ridicule his own appearance. Yet here he seems oddly restrained, as if he would rather be doing anything other than his usual shtick. Apparently no one told him that his routine doesn’t work without the juice cranked up.
He plays Jackie Moon, one-hit wonder singer and owner of the Flint Tropics basketball team. Business is bad, and the ABA plans to disband at the end of the season, with only four teams merging into the NBA. Hoping to boost his team into fourth place and join the NBA, Jackie goes into promotion overdrive (bear wrestling night) and whips the team, including star players Woody Harrelson and Andre Benjamin, into shape. Not helping matters for me is that their main competition is the San Antonio Spurs, the only sports team in existence that I’d be sad to see wiped out in a plane crash.
“Semi-Pro” is a tedious bore punctuated with a few moments of moderate amusement, even the better jokes being forgettable. The best parts, such as those featuring Harrelson’s washed up NBA benchwarmer, go by all too fast, while the worst, like the cringe-inducing poker game where Ferrell and company play with a revolver, outstay their welcome by an amount of time equal to the length of the gag minus several seconds. A series of joyless cameos from the likes of Tim Meadows and Rob Corddry add little to the proceedings other than to distract the audience with a stream of mildly recognizable faces.
I’d say that fans won’t be disappointed, but I think they will; Ferrell’s other comedies at least had the mark of a star that was working his ass off for the laughs. Here’s hoping that the next time I review a Will Ferrell comedy I won’t be tempted to lapse into that intro for the third time. And that the film is semi-good.
2 out of 5
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