Semi-Pro review

It all seems rather formulaic. Will Ferrell finds yet another sport to serve as a backdrop for his shtick. Last time out it was ice-skating (Blades of Glory) and before that there was NASCAR (Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby) and soccer (Kicking and Screaming). This time it's basketball, more specifically, 1976 semi-professional basketball. They say, familiarity breeds contempt. In this case, it's not so much contempt as boredom. There's nothing in Semi-Pro we haven't seen before from Ferrell and better.

A less athletic-looking specimen it's hard to find. Ferrell seemingly relishes any opportunity to celebrate his lack of sporting prowess and show off his blubbery belly. But where Blades of Glory and Talladega Nights derived much of their humour from spoofing the respective sports, Semi-Pro does little in the way of satirizing basketball. Indeed, the game is more the setting than the subject for the film's slight story.

Ferrell plays the ego-maniacal Jackie Moon, the owner, coach and player of the hapless and inappropriately-named Flint Michigan Tropics (an ironic reversal on Los Angeles' basketball team being called the Lakers). Moon is the town's flamboyant entrepreneur, who, in addition to owning the Tropics and the Kremlin nightclub, enjoyed pop success with the disco-hit 'Love Me Sexy.' When he learns that four teams from the ABA league will be merged with the professional NBA, he is determined to make the Tropics one of them. In an effort to reverse the team's fortunes, he signs the one-time Boston Celtic player Monix (Woody Harrelson) whose stock has dwindled to the point where he's traded for a washing machine.

Working with little in the way of raw talent, save for the team's star player Clarence 'Coffee' Black (André Benjamin), Monix sets about trying to lift the Tropics from their perennial place at the bottom of the league. In Moon's efforts to convince the NBA that Flint can sustain a franchise, he comes up with a series of outlandish promotional schemes to boost attendance, like wrestling a bear, all of which naturally go disastrously wrong.

Fans of Ferrell tend to require of him nothing more than being his goofy, typical self. Semi-Pro provides him with the forum for just that, but the script by Scot Armstrong possesses few genuinely funny moments. Scot Alterman, making his directorial debut, fails to inject much energy or purpose as things drift along as if waiting for something to happen, which never does. Not so much a slam-dunk as an air shot.

Kevin Murphy