"The spandex, the glitter, the egos!" Having already taken on the worlds of high fashion (ZOOLANDER), TV news broadcasting (RON BURGUNDY) and NASCAR superstardom (TALLADEGA NIGHTS), Will Ferrell takes another easy shot at a very wide target: the sequined-and-feathered world of competitive figure skating. While funny enough, it's essentially a one-joke movie.
Bitter rivals throughout their careers, men's figure-skating champs Jimmy MacElroy (Jon Heder) and Chazz Michael Michaels (Ferrell) couldn't be more different. Plucked from an orphanage by horse- and orphan-training billionaire Darren MacElroy (William Fichtner), fey, feathered-haired Jimmy was virtually engineered to be the ultimate skater, thanks in large part to his coach (Craig T. Nelson). Chazz, on the other hand, doesn't need no stinkin' coaching: Raised on the streets of a bad-ass steel town and in trouble with the law from a young age, Chazz came up through the underground world of sewer skating, and is now the closest thing men's figure skating has to a rock star: a swaggering, boozing sex addict with a slew of medals, a book of poetry ("Let Me Put My Poems in You") and an Adult Film Award under his belt. Notorious for the sex-on-ice routines that drive men to despair and women to shed their panties, Chazz is the bad boy of men's singles figure skating. But Chazz's and Jimmy's careers come to a premature finale when, after tying for the gold at the World Wintersport Games IXX, a fistfight breaks out on the podium. Dragged in front of the National Figure Skating Association, Chazz and Jimmy are stripped of their medals and permanently banned from competition. Three-and-a-half years later, an alcoholic Chazz is appearing in tacky kiddie ice shows, barfing inside his costume and mumbling obscenities into his mic, while Jimmy is fitting bratty adolescents with skates at the local Ski 'n' Shred. But they get a second shot at gold courtesy of Jimmy's obsessed fan Hector (Nick Swardson), who's frankly embarrassed about stalking a has-been so he's found a loophole in the NFSA ban. Chazz and Jimmy are actually only forbidden to skate in the men's singles division: Nothing can stop them from competing as a same-sex pair — if the macho world of men's figure skating can handle the sight of two guys in spandex dancing in each other's arms.
This all amounts to little more than a five-minute comedy sketch padded out to feature length, but there are some funny bits, mostly involving the brother-sister team of Stranz and Fairchild Van Waldenberg (Will Arnett and his real-life wife, SNL's Amy Poehler), "America's skating sweethearts," who are in fact evil Machiavellian schemers who'll stop at nothing to win the gold at Wintersports XX; they'll even pimp their younger sister Katie (The Office's charming Jenna Fischer) to Jimmy. The on-air commentary is a hoot ("Call him little orphan awesome!," "These guys put the 'bone' in 'Zamboni'!"), but honestly, you only have to watch skate-stud Elvis Stojko "rocking out" to "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," completely unaware that he's actually out-Queening Freddie Mercury, to know the sport is already well on its way to self-parody. And with a running headstart like that, the movie really should be much funnier than it actually is. leave a comment --Ken Fox
