Blades of Glory

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If you're a fan of Will Ferrell's previous satiric roles in things like "Anchorman" and "Talladega Nights," you might like him in 2007's "Blades of Glory." But if you think he's simply over-the-top in moronic comedies, you'll get no relief here. Same thing with his co-star, Jon Heder. Some folks found "Napoleon Dynamite" hilarious; others found it tedious. It's kind of a 50/50 split. A few parts of "Blades" are uproariously funny, while most other parts are routine and dumb. I wish it had been more consistent, but there you are.

"Blades of Glory" is kind of a one-note affair, actually, and when it's stretched as far as this one is, it gets old in a hurry. Here's the deal: Ferrell and Heder play bitter rivals in the world of professional, international skating, and one day they tie for the gold. On the podium accepting their medals, they get into a brawl, and the National Skating Federation bans them forever from singles competition.

Ah, but three years later they come up with a plan: A loophole in the bylaws allows them to compete outside their division and team up as a pair, with Jimmy's old coach (Craig T. Nelson, who else?) guiding them. They become "the first male-male pair team in the history of the sport." And that's the single note. Now, this might have worked as a fifteen-minute sketch or even a thirty-minute television segment, but for ninety minutes it's stretching the point.

Think of it as "Ice Skating: Men in Tights." Ferrell and Heder get a lot of mileage out of their fancy sequined costumes and the fact that they're both men in a world of men-women teams. They also get too much mileage out of homophobic gags and crotch jokes, but we might have expected that.

Neither main character is very likeable. Ferrell plays Chazz Michael Michaels, a disgusting, overweight, sex-addicted, macho man on skates. One of his promos tells us he is "an ice-devouring sex tornado, spawned in the hellholes of Motown," who began his career in sewer skating and adult filmmaking. Pretty silly stuff. Heder plays his opposite, Jimmy MacElroy, a flamboyant, slightly effeminate crowd pleaser, who grew up a privileged prodigy, cared for and nurtured by an arrogant billionaire, Darren MacElroy (William Fichtner), who adopted him as a child to raise as a champion.

Chazz and Jimmy are different in every way, the outlaw and the golden boy, a situation the filmmakers hope will create the movie's tension and comedy. Sometimes it works; often it's too obvious and overdone. Ferrell is a bigger-than-life slob, Heder is all Napoleon Dynamite innocence, and it's not enough to sustain an entire movie.

So, in order to have something happen, the script incorporates a couple of villains, a brother-and-sister skating team of snakes, Stranz and Fairchild Van Waldenberg (Will Arnett and Amy Poehler). They are super-phony sweet and will do anything to win. Think of Tonya Harding here, and you'll get a pretty good idea what they're up to. Then, there is a romantic interest for Jimmy in the person of the Van Waldenberg's younger sister, Katie (Jenna Fischer), with the usual complications and misunderstandings.

The movie's co-directors, Josh Gordon and Will Speck, did "Blades of Glory" as their first feature-length, big-screen movie together, so we can forgive them some rookie mistakes. Fortunately, they had two co-producers in Ben Stiller and Stuart Cornfeld who had previously done the satires "Dodgeball" and "Starsky and Hutch." Fortunately, too, they had the good sense to use real-life skating stars Scott Hamilton, Nancy Kerrigan, Dorothy Hamill, Brian Boitano, and Peggy Fleming in cameos, as well as real-life announcer Jim Lampley and, for no particular reason, Luke Wilson in their cast.

I enjoyed some of the movie's first thirty minutes or so, and then it started to lose me. Around halfway through, I was about to give up, the story and characters getting much too absurd for me, when the infamous North Korean "Iron Lotus" newsreel clip came along, and I laughed so hard my eyes teared up and I had to shut off the player for a time. That one interlude doesn't make "Blades of Glory" a great comedy, but for that moment I can forgive it a lot of its faults.

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