You ask, is Blades of Glory funny?
To which I answer, have you ever seen men's figure skating?
From the billowy pirate shirts to the posturing egotism, the sport is, if anything, such an obvious comedic bull's-eye that you wonder a) why did no one think of this before and b) how inept a filmmaker would you have to be to botch it?
Nevertheless, Blades of Glory employed not one but two directors -- first-timers Will Speck and Josh Gordon -- to ensure no such debacle occurred. This is the equivalent of hiring two airline pilots to assemble a paper airplane.
The comedy might stumble as nearly as much as it glides, but there is more than enough sheer, side-splitting absurdity to justify your attention and admission.
Does it, like many a past Will Ferrell comedy, fizzle out on the fumes of a one-note concept before the end credits roll? You bet. But what a concept.
Ferrell stars as Chazz Michael Michaels, yet another incarnation of the comic actor's continued riff on the obnoxiousness of the male id. His Chazz is all strut and swagger, the figure skater as rock god or, given his addiction to sex, porn star. His chief rival, Jimmy MacElroy (Jon Heder), conversely has probably never seen a porn. A child prodigy raised and groomed by a germ-phobic billionaire to be an uber-skater, he's the flouncy antithesis of Chazz's loud, lewd lout -- a peacock, as his costume attests, in a gilded cage.
When the two get into a brawl, they're both banned from ever competing again. Redemption arrives when a loophole is discovered: They may never be able to compete in the singles division again, but they can form the first male-on-male figure skating pairs team.
Not surprisingly, Blades of Glory is at its best when its characters are on ice.
The sequence in which Chazz and Jimmy stage their return is every iota the crowd-pleasing laugh-til-it-hurts marathon of mortified moves that you'd expect.
(The ante is further upped when their gruff coach, played by Craig T. Nelson, decides to introduce a potentially lethal move into the duo's performance.)
Yet off the ice, and much like Ferrell's physique, the film suffers from too much padding. The inclusion of real-life husband and wife Will Arnett and Amy Poehler as a brother-sister skating team is welcome, if too long-lived. They conspire to create a rift between Chazz and Jimmy by having their timid sister, Kate, played by The Office's Jenna Fischer, seduce both bosom buddies.
For their parts, Ferrell and Heder are skating on auto-pilot. Heder, playing yet another social misfit, has yet to show much range beyond Napoleon Dynamite.
Might we be so bold to request a moratorium from Ferrell's shameless displays of abject, and uncalled-for, nudity? As any figure skater could tell you, some routines deserve to be retired.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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