SemiPro
March 2nd, 2008, 1:03 am Hobbies Ideas
Will Ferrell, at the best of times, is an acquired taste. The blockbusting
comedian and headlining star of Anchorman and Talladega Nights regularly
bludgeons his audience into submissive giggles by sheer force of
personality. Hysterical outbursts, petulant rants and violent tantrums are
his forte. Nuance, naturally, is not. And yet, ironically, this same
monstrous presence saves the basketball comedy Semi-Pro from generic
banality, and pushes it instead into strange off-kilter places.
Set in 1976 as a minor-league basketball team in Flint, Michigan, attempts to
upgrade to the majors, the movie is superficially similar to sports comedies
such as Dodgeball and Ferrell’s own Blades of Glory. It features a gang of
wildcard amateurs, including Woody Harrelson’s fallen idol, Monix, and Andr
Benjamin’s sharp shooter, Coffee Black. It has an erratic team leader in
Ferrell’s owner, coach, player and former pop idol Jackie Moon (he boasts a
lone smash single, Love Me Sexy). And it follows the team’s progress,
including training montage, from no-hope zeroes to sporting heroes.
This, however, is where the similarities end. For Moon is such a huge
character, and so monumentally played by Ferrell, that he transforms the
film into a haphazard series of Moon-centred vignettes loosely hung around
the sports-movie format. Witness his breezy entrance into a grim Michigan
nightclub, sliding into the DJ booth, slapping his single down on the
turntable and announcing, without irony, to the expectant crowd, You’re a
sexy town, Flint! Or his full-body tantrum at a boardroom meeting where he
takes zany Jerry Lewis physicality to its limits. There’s even an ingenious
Russian roulette sequence that’s deftly played for laughs at an after-hours
poker game (the gun has one bullet: they don’t know it; but we do).
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