Blades of Glory: Critic Reviews

Blades of Glory has funny moves even when its characters can barely move, but the film seldom gets past its one basic laugh: that a real man figure-skating is a contradiction in terms.

With Blades of Glory, Will Ferrell and Jon Heder stake an early claim to being the comedy couple of the year.

There is a steady stream of laughs and narrative interest. Blades isn't quite as funny as Zoolander or Dodgeball, but it deserves a solid score from the judges.

Some of the best lines are featured in the TV commercials, making you wish the premise had lived up to its promise.

To see seemingly regular guys utterly stripped of dignity and defense is cruel enough, but crueler still is the laughter that you cannot seem to stop from rupturing your lungs and aorta.

As long as it's near the ice, Blades of Glory sticks a lot of its landings.

Blades is not quite Talladega Nights on Ice, but it's a lot of fun.

Blissfully silly, triumphantly tasteless and improbably hilarious.

Blades of Glory is too broad to be satire and not mean enough by half -- in any case, competitive figure skating already does a pretty good job spoofing itself.

The comedy plunges so deep into lame (lame?) it comes out on the side of fangless fun.

The directors, Will Speck and Josh Gordon, nail the subtext and straight-faced deportment of Ferrell's best movies.

I'd try to avoid the usual cliche of saying this is a fine 10-minute Saturday Night Live sketch that's padded with another 80 minutes of filler, but if this unclever and mostly unfunny film doesn't bother to put in any effort, why should I?

It may not take Ferrell in any new directions, but it proves that in the right context, looking like Kurt Russell's puffy brother in flaming Spandex, on ice, can give a guy an edge.

Farrell and Heder are pretty funny, but they're consistently upstaged by supporting players William Fichtner, Will Arnett, and Amy Poehler.

Dumb with a capital D, Blades of Glory takes its (almost) fleshed-out sketch-comedy idea as far as an ice-skating buddy movie with we're-not-gay jokes and a psycho stalker can go.

This is a one-joke movie: A chubby klutz doing a lutz. But Ferrell does klutzy so well that it's just as funny during the last reel as in the first one.

If Blades of Glory isn't quite a triple-Lutz, nailed-it triumph of a movie, it's still loads of laughs and guaranteed to please audiences everywhere.

One day some enterprising company will probably package Ferrell's sillier comedies together for a boxed DVD set. It has its moments, but Blades of Glory probably won't be the first one of the bunch you watch.

There may be an overabundance of pain jokes, crotch jokes and painful crotch jokes, but at the end of the program, this farce is the triple axel of comedy.

You know those one-joke Saturday Night Live sketches that start to age after six minutes? Blades of Glory is one joke that lasts 93 minutes, costs $11 and could involve sitting next to a guy who retells the movie into his cellphone.

Silly as a drag queen convention and subtle as an un-flushed toilet, Blades of Glory is everything you'd hope for in a Will Ferrell comedy.

Blades of Glory is only slightly less funny -- if you ask ignorant old me -- than watching real figure skating. It's your coin.

As with the recent hit middle-aged road comedy Wild Hogs, Blades of Glory tries to work maximum comic mileage from heterosexual men's fear of proximity to other men's penises.

It asks the rhetorical question, 'So what's wrong with the idea of a guy-guy pairs team?' On the other hand, Jimmy's butt-strutting in that peacock suit, his mincing walk, play right into the stereotypes that boneheads everywhere love to laugh at.

Blades of Glory does have its moments of loopy ingenuity, even if none of them goes quite far enough.