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Written by Christopher Kelly (MCT)
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Thursday, 28 February 2008 |
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 As peanut butter is to jelly and ham is to Swiss, Will Ferrell is to the 21st-century sports comedy: You wouldn’t necessarily want one without the other.
Having already tackled soccer (the dubious “Kicking & Screaming”), NASCAR racing (“Talladega Nights”) and Olympic figure skating (“Blades of Glory”), Ferrell now moves on to basketball in “Semi-Pro,” a cheerful romp set in 1970s, when the American Basketball Association is about to be absorbed by the National Basketball Association. The result, as is often the case with Ferrell’s movies, even the non-sports ones like “Elf” and “Anchorman,” is scattershot and dopey. But you’ll have a hard time keeping a straight face.
Ferrell plays Jackie Moon, an R&B one-hit-wonder who used the earnings from his song “Love Me Sexy” to buy the Flint Tropics, a team of lovable losers whose arena looks not much bigger than your average high school gymnasium. Jackie is not just the owner of the team, but also the coach and a player — a sort of triple threat without the threat. And when his fellow ABA owners announce that a number of their teams will be a part of an NBA expansion, Jackie is giddy: At long last, his dreams of playing professional basketball will be realized.
There’s a catch, of course: The NBA will accept only four new teams from the eight-team ABA, and they want nothing to do with Flint. Jackie’s only hope is to rally his last-place team to a series of victories that will launch them into fourth place, thereby forcing the NBA to include them in the expansion. (In real life, only seven teams completed the ABA’s final season in 1976, including the Indiana Pacers, the New York Nets, the Denver Nuggets and the San Antonio Spurs; alas, Flint never had a team.)
In an era in which we relish the weekly foibles of those who get voted off “American Idol” and fired from “The Apprentice,” an era where awards and riches are so obsessed about that even the People’s Choice Awards get handicapped on the Internet, there’s something undeniably charming about a sports movie in which the team is simply trying to secure fourth place. From the Flint Tropics’ foul-mouthed, announcers (Will Arnett and Andrew Daly), who don’t seem to mind that there aren’t many fans listening, to the referee who moonlights as a Catholic priest (Matt Walsh), “Semi-Pro” is fundamentally a celebration of the glories of being second-rate.
Written by Scot Armstrong, who previously wrote the Ferrell vehicle “Old School,” it’s also an unexpectedly deft riff on real-life events. As Jackie struggles to pack the stands — resorting to cash giveaways for which he doesn’t have the cash and a free nacho night for which he never bothers to buy any nachos — “Semi-Pro” captures a curious point in American sports history. Sporting events were about to turn into raucous public carnivals; team owners were transforming from quiet men in suits to flashy celebrities in Versace. Indeed, what makes the best gag in “Semi-Pro” so funny — when Jackie agrees to wrestle a live bear during the half-time show — is that it’s not so hard to imagine someone like Mark Cuban doing the same thing if Dallas Mavericks ticket sales were to start slumping.
‘SEMI-PRO’
• Critic says: 3 stars
• Rating: R for language and some sexual content
• Running time: 1 hr. 31 mins.
• Starring: Andre Benjamin, Will Ferrell, Woody Harrelson, Maura Tierney, Andrew Daly
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