Title: Semi-Pro Movie Review
Genre: Comedy/Sport
Cast: Will Ferrell, Woody Harrelson, Andre Benjamin themselves …
Director: Kent Alterman
Release: (2008)
The first stage of grief is denial, and it’s a stage I’ve been in for a little while now when it comes to two of the stars of this movie. Painfully, but perhaps for the best, Semi-Pro has finally forced me to accept the reality of the situation and face up to the two questions that, just a few years ago, I never would have believed I’d be asking myself but now are all too real: Why is Will Ferrell still here, and why is Woody Harrelson not?
Semi-Pro stars Will Ferrell as Will Ferrell doing an imitation of Will Ferrell playing 1970’s pop singer and basketball team owner/player/coach Jackie Moon. When an impending merger between the ABA and the NBA threatens to leave his team on the outside looking in, Moon makes it his mission to do whatever it takes to get his team into the deal and into the NBA. In order to raise attendance and make his little Flint (Michigan) Tropics a more attractive franchise for the NBA’s business, Moon starts promoting the team with any and all kinds of sensationally dangerous and poorly thought-out halftime carnival attractions that his impulsive and short-sighted imagination can conceive of. In order to make his team more competitive on the court, Moon uses that same imagination to coach up a team that runs plays in an equally impulsive and short-sighted way. Not surprisingly, his hare-brained efforts prove to be more successful in filling the seats than filling the bucket. But after a couple of rough losses, and a couple more “hilarious” tantrums, Moon finally agrees to focus his own efforts more on the promotional end of things and hand over coaching and play-calling duties to NBA vet and new Tropics acquisition Ed Monix (Woody Harrelson). Now, with everything in place, can the Tropics make a run at winning over their fans and capturing the attention of the NBA? Can they?? You think????
There are a few important issues that arise out of this movie, none of which have anything to do with the movie itself. Which sucked. I laughed exactly zero times in this movie from beginning to end, which I don’t think I would have even watched that long if not for having to do this review. Every line was some kind of watered-down, regurgitation of things that are supposed to be “Will Ferrell-funny”. They might as well have replaced every other line of Ferrell’s dialogue with Ferrell just turning and leering into the camera with one of his patented seductive/creepy looks and saying things like, “Hey people, I’m Will Ferrell. This is funny because I’m Will Ferrell. You know what’s funny about this? Me, Mr. Will Ferrell., etc. …” And when I say “might as well have”, I mean “absolutely should have”, because the more I think about it, that would have been way funnier. But back to the important issues.
The first issue is one that I have been grappling with during any movie I’ve seen with Woody Harrelson in it over the last five to ten years, which is: whatever happened to Woody Harrelson? How did this guy go from leading man, big-name, mega-star to barely promoted supporting roles in such a short amount of time with practically no explanation? It’s not even so odd that someone like him might reach a certain level of success and then choose to start dialing back the workload and maybe just pick and choose projects and characters that appeal to him on some artistic level, but what is odd is that when he does show up in films now, it’s often a surprise to the audience because the studios hardly even use his name or face in any of the ads, previews, or promotional shots anymore.
Just think about how much press No Country for Old Men got last year – in the lead up to it’s release, in it’s critical acclaim, in the lead up to the Oscars, during the Oscars, and in the huge push to promote the DVD release just after the Oscars – if you hadn’t (or haven’t) seen it, would you even know that Woody Harrelson was in that movie? I didn’t. Aren’t we talking about the same guy who charmed us as Woody Boyd, scared us as Mickey Knox, made us laugh as Roy Munson, made us cry as David Murphy (Indecent Proposal), and was nominated for an Academy Award as Larry Flynt? How does a guy like that fall so far off the radar (immediately after that Oscar nomination, by the way) that his Q-rating has been recently theorized to have killed the dinosaurs. It’s like he’s become America’s Easter Egg, just a tempting, little nugget that studios keep hiding in the background of our movies for us to try to find. The only possible explanation I can come up with (besides the fact that he is probably clinically insane and perhaps difficult for studios to figure out how to work with) is that the first time they used him in this way (in Wag the Dog, where he shows up more than halfway through the film with a hood pulled down over his face, only to do the big dramatic reveal where he looks up at the camera and we all go “(Gasp) – It’s Woody Harrelson!”) was met with such positive reaction that they’ve been trying to recreate that effect ever since. The only problem is that the more you keep doing this cutesy gimmick and acting like he’s just another supporting actor, the less resonant it becomes and the more he really becomes just another supporting actor. I will say that at least Semi-Pro is not the worst of the bunch at this. While he is not exactly featured prominently in most of the advertising (and some of it is still completely Woody-free, like the DVD cover), he is there to be found in most of the trailers. But the question nonetheless remains: in a world where guys like Brendan Fraser, Nicolas Cage, Kevin Costner, Jon Heder, and others are all still being asked to carry films based on their brief and long-gone primes, why hasn’t this guy been able to land a leading role in the last ten years?
The second important issue that Semi-Pro brings up is: has Will Ferrell already peaked? I hope not and I’d like to think that this movie will just be remembered as a little hiccup in a long and prolific career of classic comedies, but some of the symptoms I saw in this movie are truly troubling. The kind of disaster this movie was was not like a “Garth Brooks spends two years pretending not to be Chris Gaines” or “Michael Jordan trying to play baseball” kind of disaster, where a talented guy decides to really try something different and ends up eating sidewalk hard on it – but is able to go back into his wheelhouse afterwards and make us all forget it. This was more of a “Britney Spears at the 2007 MTV Movie Awards” kind of disaster, where someone’s act starts to get old and they start gripping in desperation and forcing the same act out louder and harder to try to distract everyone from the realization that they’re just a one-trick pony we’ve seen already, until the whole thing just starts to get uncomfortable to watch. Will Ferrell as the overconfident/undertalented athlete in some oddball sport is a trick we’ve seen already. And I’m sure we’ll see again. I just hope that it’s not all we see from him, because I’m not ready to mourn the passing of the Will Ferrell era just yet. In fact, now that I think about it, there’s probably a nearly one-hundred percent chance that we’ll see him sometime in a movie as a professional water-skier who literally tries to jump a shark (with “hilariously” disastrous results), I’m just a little afraid we may look back on Semi-Pro and realize that, figuratively, it’s already happened.
Grading
Story: C-
Acting: C-
Visuals: D
Originality/Innovation: D-
Enjoyability: D Overall: D+
