What do you get when you scramble the last three semifunny Well Ferrell comedies into a second-string rehash? It’s a “Semi-Pro” that’s all-boring.
Today’s ’70s-era basketball send-up is dribble drivel that can’t even score enough jokes to please his least demanding fans. By ridiculing the same decade’s retro tackiness, it depends for its tired sight gags on territory already milked in “Anchorman” while laying up the same worn-out sports flick gimmicks of his NASCAR and figure-skating spoofs “Talladega Nights” and “Blades of Glory.”
Directed by Kent Alterman and written by Scot Armstrong, their foul farce imagines that the picture of Ferrell’s beer-bellied body in shorty-shorts and a white-guy Afro will be enough to make the hoop goop fly. But their mugging clown’s idiot shtick is way past over at a time when producer Judd Apatow is giving us raunchy but smart and original romps like “Knocked-Up,” “Superbad” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”
The thin premise has Ferrell playing the supposedly wild-and-crazy Jackie Moon. It’s 1976 and he’s the lame owner-coach-player of the American Basketball Association’s least successful team, the Flint, Mich., Tropics. The league is about to fold. The only hope Moon has to have his team survive the merger with the NBA is to start winning and attracting spectators on a level with the Pacers, the Nuggets and the Nets.
Of course, humor is meant to ensue. Moon comes up with ever more bizarre attempts atgame promotion while washed-up old pro Monix (Woody Harrelson) arrives in town to try to whip the undisciplined team into championship shape.
The haphazard script throws in a couple of oddly truncated subplots. But the supporting characters seem like they are in a different movie —maybe a drama, even — compared to Ferrell’s awfully over-the-top Jackie Moon. Harrelson’s straight man, Monix, romances a former flame in town, Lynn (played by “ER’s” great Maura Tierney in a nonentity role). Meanwhile, the team’s one good hotshot player, Clarence Coffee Black (Andre Benjamin), has legitimate dreams of big-time glory.
But with usual comedy suspects like Andy Richter and Will Arnett given little to work with, this two-toned piece doesn’t play on either level. It’s not funny, and you don’t give a darn about the characters. The production earns one (and only one) star because at least it boasts a catchy, high-energy top-40 soundtrack that reflects the funky beat of the 1970s.
Obviously, though, the movie’s producers spent more money securing song rights than they did on talent. And that puts “Semi-Pro” way out of bounds.
‘Semi-Pro’
*
» Starring: Will Ferrell, Woody Harrelson, Maura Tierney
» Director: Kent Alterman
» Rated R for language and some sexual content
» Running time: 90 minutes
