Semi-Pro: Critic Reviews

Judging from this low-scoring sports comedy about the mystique of men with balls, Will Ferrell needs to call a time-out from belly baring to refocus his fan-favorite game of playing clueless male doofuses.

Like many of Will Ferrell's recent films, "Semi-Pro" finds the sweet spot between sports melodrama and parody, and hammers it for 90 diverting minutes.

Chillingly devoid of laughs, and looks like some deconstructionist experiment, deliberately draining the comedy genre of jokes to show the parched, pointless story-skeleton beneath.

There are some ludicrous sight gags and uniquely silly, if foul-mouthed, laughs. The movie falters when it tries to be serious. Fortunately, those moments are few.

Our hesitation to identify [Ferrell] as the genuinely funny star of comedies such as Old School and Anchorman comes after seeing this actor's halfhearted, disconcertingly crude and only occasionally amusing performance.

It does get the funk out ya face for 86 minutes.

In the end, it's comedy comfort food, something powdered poured from a box.

For die-hard Ferrell fans, this could be the ultimate test. He has been playing variations of Elf for five years, and his antics have grown as stale as Jackie's socks.

It's long on shorts but short on punchlines.

Technically, it's not a foul to shoot a stupid sports comedy. In fact, it's becoming something of a routine maneuver for Will Ferrell.

Like so much in this life, Will Ferrell's comedies tread the razor-thin line separating smart/stupid from stupid/stupid.

Aside from Kicking & Screaming, this is probably Ferrell's weakest comedy to date.

I loved Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction; liked him in Old School and Talladega Nights. Yet, except for a skyhook or two, his work in Semi-Pro is strictly amateur.

Erratic, overlong and repetitive, Semi-Pro seems not to have been written but sketched out in chalkboard diagrams before the actors took their marks in front of the cameras.

Semi-Pro is precisely that: a movie that is sort of professionally made and sort of professionally acted with no serious expectations beyond earning money and offering audience members some passing entertainment.

Will Ferrell's latest comedy splits time between being a goofy basketball movie and . . . a whole bunch of other stuff, none of it particularly interesting.

Very much in the tradition of Slap Shot, Semi-Pro scores big laughs with the rowdy play-by-play of hard-luck hoopsters struggling for professional survival.

Semi-Pro goes up for the dunk and misses the hoop, the backboard and the point. Instead, it manages to both strike out and get sacked. Whose idea was it to remake Slap Shot a la Jerry Lewis?

Semi-Pro tries for semi-sweet when bittersweet would have been better, semi-silly when full-bore absurd was called for. And the final score? Semi-funny.

You can't help but marvel, and laugh at, Ferrell's indefatigable enthusiasm and willingness to make a complete ass of himself.

Ferrell is to the sports comedy what the Toronto Maple Leafs are to the hockey biz: Hard-core fans are sure to show up and find reasons to be amused. The rest of us can only hope for better days.

There isn't enough going on in Semi-Pro, comically or otherwise, to sustain the movie even through its first half-hour. This may be one of the most sluggish sports comedies ever made -- even the supposedly rousing final sequence feels belabored.

If you're on the prowl for a Ferrell yuk-fest, you'd do better renting one of his more successful comedies than spending money on this faux sports dud. Only die-hard fans of the SNL alumn will find anything worthwhile here.

Semi-Pro is a mess, but it's a likable one.

Even when the script, by Scot Armstrong, shoots airballs, Ferrell is a slam-dunk.