Semi-Pro a Cinematic Airball

In its first scene, Semi-Pro offers a tantalizing glimpse of a movie that never materializes. As the owner, coach, and power forward for the Flint Tropics, Jackie Moon (Will Ferrell) is an egoist of the highest order. At every home game—and perhaps away games, as well—Jackie performs his novelty hit “Love Me Sexy,” introduces the cheerleaders with an uncomfortable degree of intimacy, and coins offensive designations for his teammates faster than George W. Bush at a press conference.

It’s a truly great scene, at once gleefully absurd and awkwardly revealing. Like many of Ferrell’s screen and television moments, it captures the hungry quest for attention and frightening degree of arrogance at the heart of his best characters. But unfortunately, it’s a fleeting moment. Most of Semi-Pro is serviceably funny and charming, but it lacks the dark, gregarious heart that makes Anchorman and Talladega Nights so compelling—think of Ron Burgundy in the phone booth or Ricky Bobby insulting his father-in-law.

Set in the 1970s, Semi-Pro tells the story of the fictional and wonderfully named Tropics as they struggle to gain enough legitimacy to enter the NBA at the end of the American Basketball Association’s final season. As in most sports movies, the team is composed of a ragtag group of misfits, including the non-verbal Lithuanian and the talented-yet-undisciplined-yet-ultimately-promising star—played by the enormously charismatic André Benjamin.

The arrival of Monix (a restrained Woody Harrelson), an NBA player with a bad temper and a serious attitude, prods the team into action. Jackie is profoundly incompetent, but he is also ambitious. At a crucial moment, he cedes his influence to Monix, who teaches the Tropics to work together as a team.

If I sound a bit ironic, it’s not because I have a problem with the fact that Semi-Pro uses the standard sports movie formula. The formula is a solid narrative of collective success and discipline, and when well-deployed, it works. But it doesn’t really belong in Semi-Pro because Will Ferrell is simply too funny and too subversive for this kind of thing. Like Daniel Day-Lewis, who seemed to add an entire mythology to There Will Be Blood and thus transcended the plot at every turn, Ferrell has too much presence to be subsumed into a standard Hollywood sports picture, but that’s exactly what happens.

Semi-Pro is a halfhearted period piece (the press material quotes cast member Andrew Daly, who said “I think the seventies are just intrinsically hilarious,” and the sense of time and place never really goes further than this kind of one-note amusement), but its setting only reminds me of how much Ferrell does not belong. After all, his best verbal humor—“I’m creating a diversion by running around,” said without a hint of irony—and physical gags (there are many seahorse costumes in this film) are inherently digressive and timeless. They’re all about Will Ferrell. Semi-Pro’s only real problem is that it isn’t.