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He Got Lame | Will Ferrell rocks the whiteboy Afro as a ’70s basketball player in Semi-Pro.

SEMI-PRO
Directed by Kent Alterman. Starring Will Ferrell, Woody Harrelson, André Benjamin, Will Arnett. Opens Fri, Feb 29.
3 Stars

Semi-Pro takes place in 1976 during the last season of the freewheeling American Basketball Association before it was absorbed into the more staid NBA. Will Ferrell plays Jackie Moon, the owner, coach, and power forward of the fictitious (but wonderfully named) Flint Tropics: told that the top four ABA teams will join the NBA and the rest will be disbanded, Moon makes it his mission to pull his hapless squad out of the basement and finish the season in fourth place.

The makers of Semi-Pro aren’t much more ambitious in their goals. No one’s trying to make a classic comedy here—unlike Slap Shot, one of the film’s obvious inspirations, Semi-Pro isn’t really a movie so much as a place where Will Ferrell and his comedy buddies (who this time out include Will Arnett, Andy Richter, Rob Corddry, and Woody Harrelson) can hang out for 90 minutes or so. They’re like a bunch of veteran athletes playing an inconsequential mid-season game without many people in the stands: they can pass and shoot like All-Stars, but they’re not exactly hustling for the ball.

And I was fine with that: Semi-Pro’s amiably sloppy tone actually seems perfectly appropriate to a story about a basketball team so poor that it can’t even afford to pay the winner of a $10,000 halftime free-throw contest. One of my favourite scenes shows Ferrell and a couple of his teammates sitting around a poker table in a smoke-filled rec room with the two sportscasters who cover the Tropics for the local TV station. The scene doesn’t really go anywhere, but I like the convivial vibe it establishes, not just the fun of watching guys like Ferrell, Arnett, and Tim Meadows casually riffing on each other, but the way it suggests a certain camaraderie between the athletes and the broadcasters, all of them stuck in a third-rate city and doing what they can not to feel like failures.

I’m sure critics are going to slam Ferrell for playing yet another blowhard idiot in yet another smart-dumb sports comedy, as if Talledega Nights, Kicking and Screaming, and Blades of Glory hadn’t already exhausted the genre. I’m more forgiving towards it; I tend to view Will Ferrell movies as sort of a throwback to the movie comedy series of the ’30s and ’40s starring Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello, comics who played essentially the same parts in film after film. Did people back then complain their movies were repetitive? I don’t think so; if anything, I think the repetitiveness was kind of a virtue. 

It helps that Jackie Moon is one of Ferrell’s more appealing characters—unlike his blustery, macho buffoons in Talladega Nights and Blades of Glory, Moon is more of an overgrown, easily wounded kid, a one-hit-wonder who used the money from his big song (a surreal bit of sub-Barry White bedroom funk called “Love Me Sexy,” whose lyrics, it turns out, he stole from his mother) to buy a basketball team and thereby realize his dream of playing in the pros. The only place you see him throwing his weight around is in the DJ booth at the nightclub he owns, where a little sign taped to the glass amusingly warns, “We don’t take requests anymore!”

That’s too bad, because I have one. I’m willing to cut you some slack on Semi-Pro, Will Ferrell, but if you do decide to make another sports comedy, could you at least be sure to get John C. Reilly to be in it too?