Semi-Pro: Movie Review (2008)

Directed by Kent Alterman, written by Scot Armstrong, 87 minutes, rated R.

The new Kent Alterman movie, "Semi-Pro," is awful. Full-on awful. There's nothing semi-awful about it.

The movie is pointless, it isn't funny, it's lazy and it's stupid, and it had the packed crowd at my screening lulled into the sort of restless coma in which all you could hear was breathing. And sighing. And, if the guy in front of me was any indication, also deep moments of slumber. It was as if we all were under a giant oxygen tent together, with no way out and the oxygen running low. Nurse!

The movie is billed as a comedy, and yet nobody was laughing at the string of pseudohip, semi-written jokes littered throughout. Certainly the three separate groups of people who got up and walked out weren't laughing. Mid-way through, they wisely realized they'd been fooled into buying tickets for a stinker, and they weren't going to waste their lives sitting there any longer.

Some of us longed to join them. Some of us want those excruciating 87 minutes back.
Based on Scot Armstrong's remedial script, "Semi-Pro" finds Will Ferrell trotting out that same ol' bumbling shtick he's been prostituting to the masses for years, sometimes with moments of success. And yet the cluelessness that worked for him in, say, "Blades of Glory," "Talladega Nights," and "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" has gone flat. Though elements are in place here for a good comedy, none of it comes together.

In the movie, Ferrell is moody Jackie Moon, a flabby, aging semi-pro basketball player from Flint, Mich., who sports the sort of tawny Afro Barbra Streisand donned during her Esther Hoffman days in 1976's "A Star is Born." For Ferrell, this isn't exactly a plus--the wig isn't funny--but neither is his performance, which is sacked by a script that doesn't allow him the sort of lines he could sell.

In a nutshell, the plot: Moon is the player, coach and owner of a middling semi-pro basketball team called the Flint Tropics, which is about to have a chance to enter the NBA. To do so, Moon and his players need to attract a major fan base, which is achieved in all sorts of ways that have little to do with basketball, such as Moon roller-skating down a jump and flying over a bevy of nearly naked women or, in one scene, fighting a bear, because, you know, what's funnier than fighting a bear?

The movie struggles to find an answer while, in the interim, a distracting subplot tries to take root. It involves Woody Harrelson as a former pro basketball player named Monix, who is fighting to get back with his ex-girlfriend, Lynn (Maura Tierney). Why do we care about these two when their characters and their relationship are so unformed? The answer is that we don't. Like so much of this bum movie, the characters are stranded and the subplot goes nowhere, but that, at this point, shouldn't come as a surprise.

Grade: BOMB

View the video review here.