.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

There is an unsung law in comedy where a man who knows he is wearing a funny suit is usually never funny, but when you give a man a funny suit who has no idea what he has, that's comedy. In Blades of Glory Will Ferrell wears a lot of funny suits, not to mention: a funny wig, a funny hat and a funny evil wizard costume. Farrell is Hollywood's resident goofball. He's also a comedic force, attacking scenes of utter stupidity with ferocious comic gusto, drawing attention to the stupidity but never himself as performing a stupid act. When Farrell steps on screen it is a rare comic sight of performer and performance being indistinguishable.

Farrell is the wonderfully named Chazz Michael Michaels, a figure skating champion and sex addict who does everything for himself; the only man who has ever won a gold medal and an adult video award. His philosophy: "Clothes optional." Chazz's arch figure skating rival is Jimmy MacElroy (Jon Heder) who was adopted as a child by a millionaire who puts him through a controversial training program in order to make him a champion. Jimmy's on-ice gimmick: wearing an outfit that makes him look like a peacock.

After both Chazz and Jimmy tie for a gold metal, the pair get into a fight while standing on the awards podium, which has them both banned from figure skating for the rest of their lives. "That's quite a long time," observes Jimmy's dad who then leaves him standing on the side of the highway.

Three and a half years later Jimmy is working in a skate shop and Chazz is embarrassing himself; a drunk, playing the part of a wizard in a children's show on ice. One day, Jimmy's obsessed stalker Hector shows up, having found a loophole in the skating rulebook, which could allow Jimmy to skate professionally again. As it turns out, when an athlete is banned, they are only excluded from their competition. This means that Jimmy could regain his lost glory in a doubles competition.

This of course leads, through some funny circumstances, Jimmy's coach (Craig T. Nelson) to realize that Jimmy and Chazz could be the perfect skating pair, Chazz being the big strong man and Jimmy being the girl. "Why do I have to be the girl?" Jimmy insists. "Because you whine too much."

Thus, the two must give up their differences and work together in order to beat gold medal winners Stranz and Fairchild Van Waldenberg (Saturday Night Live's Will Arnett and Amy Poehler), the evil skating duo who plan to sabotage Jimmy and Chazz and take the gold for themselves.

The Van Waldenberg's are of course a necessary evil; needed for the sole purpose of advancing the plot. They are overwritten and overplayed, and are inevitably, albeit unintentionally, the source of the film's misgivings. As with any Will Farrell comedy, the film's best comic bits are the subtle little jabs at generic film convection, like the way the sports commentators continue to commentate while Jimmy and Chazz have their brawl, how the commentators use lines like "Jimmy may be renowned for his personal hygiene, but after that performance, he's beginning to reek... of gold," and of course, the skating routines themselves; the best of which features Marilyn Monroe and JFK.

The film's worst bits are when it starts to grind the wheels of its plot: the routine attempts by the Van Waldenberg's to break up Jimmy and Chazz are not a mockery of cliché, but cliché itself, the romance between Jimmy and the third Van Waldenberg Katie is inevitable, but does however lead to one of the film's funniest moments on a park bench, and the film's climax goes so over-the-top that it begins to wear itself and our patience a little thin.

Maybe the biggest problem with Blades of Glory is simply that Will Ferrell and his mockeries of sports movie conventions are beginning to wear thin themselves. Having seen him at the top of his comedic game with last year's Talladega Nights and having branched out with a film of such warmth and joy like Stranger than Fiction, we know that Farrell, funny as he is, is capable of better.

That reminds me of a documentary on crossword puzzles called Wordplay. In it we learn that the New York Times crossword gets harder on a day to day basis as the week progresses. There is a point in that film when one crossword fan complains that a great puzzle maker has created a Tuesday puzzle, which is an insult, knowing that he is capable of a Friday or a Saturday. Blades of Glory is a Tuesday film for Will Farrell, but it still bides the time competently enough until Friday comes around again.