Over the last decade or so, Will Ferrell has dug himself a very comfortable Hollywood niche. In his films, he invariably plays some sort of enthusiastic, well-meaning doofus toiling away on the lower echelons of some random career ladder. Ferrell surrounds himself with a collection of comic friends, all of which add their own improvisational spin to the loose, sketch-comedy shenanigans. Racking up far more in the hit than the miss column, Ferrell’s formula has afforded the former “Saturday Night Live” star a reasonably cushy movie career.
 Like fur-lined coats, the American Basketball Association and perms, Will Ferrell never goes out of style; in fact, he brings more of the same lovable loserdom to Semi-Pro. |
Semi-Pro doesn’t tinker with the winning game plan at all. Sticking with the sporting milieu of the last few years (Kicking & Screaming, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Blades of Glory), Semi-Pro finds Ferrell cast as yet another larger-than-life loser, the owner/coach/player of a B-league basketball team in the funky, funky ’70s. The Flint Tropics are the worst team in the league, but chief cook and bottle washer Jackie Moon (Ferrell) has a secret up his sleeve. The American Basketball Association is about to go out of business, folding itself into the powerhouse NBA. (The concept is actually historically sound, as the NBA did absorb the ABA in 1976.) Moon figures he’s on easy street, at least until he’s informed by the league’s commissioner that the NBA will only take the top four teams.
Unwilling to go down without a fight, our delusional dreamer figures all he needs to do is fill the arena with fans and win every game. To these ends, he concocts a stream of outrageous publicity stunts (wrestling a bear, for example) and trades his team’s washing machine for a legendary former player (Woody Harrelson, again proving white men can jump).
| Trailer for Semi-Pro. |
As usual, it looks like everyone is enjoying themselves on screen. Ferrell has rounded out his roster with a collection of comic ringers (Will Arnett, Andy Richter, David Koechner, Rob Corddry, Tim Meadows, Ed Helms)—all of whom probably had a lot of fun hanging out on set, but none of whom seem to be working particularly hard here. The chuckles are consistent throughout Semi-Pro, but big belly laughs are rare. Instead, the film falls back on the well-worn “ragtag, come-from-behind sports team bucking the odds and aiming for the dignity of victory” plotline.
At least it’s a plotline that works. With the help of Harrelson’s world-weary knowledge and some hustle from the team’s star player (André Benjamin, trading musical stardom in Outkast for more movie roles), the Tropics start climbing the ranks of the ABA. It’s nothing you haven’t seen a thousand times before, but Semi-Pro treats the clichés with a certain reverence. It might have made for a funnier film if Ferrell and company had been a bit more irreverent and poked more fun at the genre. Most of the laughs come from Ferrell’s ridiculous attempts to promote the team, while the story is played for straight, stand-up-and-cheer sentiment. It all works in a patchwork way, and fans will walk away satisfied, but—to steal a meaningless turn-of-phrase from countless coaches throughout history—this movie doesn’t give 110 percent.
