Will Ferrell’s 70’s sports comedy, Semi-Pro, hits most of the same familiar notes that Ferrell has pounded on in his previous movies. The difference here is that he has gone to the well [or the hoop] one time too often.
Jackie Moon [Ferrell] is a one-hit wonder from the disco era [he had a hit single called Love Me Sexy – a Barry White-esque near chant] who has used his royalties to buy the Flint Tropics – a pro basketball team in the old ABA. Even better, he has named himself coach and starting power forward.
When the ABA commissioner announces that four teams will merge with the NBA – and the Tropics will not be one of them – Moon throws a tantrum to get the top four teams at the end of the season into the big show. Now all he has to do is find a way to get his team of underachieving individualists to get into fourth place.
How desperate is he? He trades the team’s washing machine for a guy who was a benchwarmer on a Celtics championship team – Eddie Monix [Woody Harrelson]. The rest of the team is appalled, but Monix knows something that Moon doesn’t – how to coach!
Semi-Pro is the usual sports flick [dredging victory from the jaws of defeat; odd relationships, and ego problems] – only with Ferrell’s particular combination of slapstick and heart. Unfortunately, the heart is mostly provided by Monix and his former girlfriend, Lynn [Maura Tierney] – and that is given a nearly obscene twist in the way it deals with their relationship and her current boyfriend, Kyle [Rob Corddry], who is Monix’s biggest fan.
Toss in some of Moon’s more boneheaded promotions [wrestling a bear; a chance to win $10,000 by hitting a foul shot from the opposing free throw line, or playing Evel Knieval and jumping across a number of cheerleader while on roller skates] and friction between Monix and the team’s star, Clarence “Coffee” Black [Andre´ Benjamin] and you have… well… a movie that wants to be a parody and an homage and succeeds at neither.
Few of the jokes are laugh-out-loud funny and Tierney’s Lynn is more a plot point than a character [and woefully underused, to boot]. The one refreshing thing about Semi-Pro is that The Big Game is the game that gets the team into fourth place! [Of course, Moon turns it into a truly odd event by dubbing it The Flint Mega Bowl!]
Most of the movie’s few real laughs come from an old hippy stoner named Dukes [Jackie Earle Haley] who wins the free throw promotion and then has to try to cash the big cheque he receives from Moon. Haley really nails the character and hits every humorous beat he has. The rest of the movie feels it’s a by-the-numbers piece of work.
Scot Armstrong’s script is predictable – as are the many seventies gags – and Kent Alterman’s direction may be energetic, but the material just isn’t up to snuff and all the energy in the world can’t keep it from being a near miss. Even my nephew, and fellow Will Ferrell fan, didn’t much care for this one.
Final Grade: C-
I have not seen it and don’t plan too, but a coworker saw it last week. Aweful. Did not like one minute of it. Stick with his other movies he says
“Semi-Pro” is a labored, foul-mouthed comedy set in 1976 about a Flint, Mich. basketball team called the Tropics. The team is a disaster until it learns that there is to be a consolidation of two leagues with some teams ending. There are a few laughs.
GRADE = “C”
Ah the very last New Line movie ever… Well I cannot say it is much of a horra… Yeah very sub par, funny at times, but overall no where near some of other Ferrell comedies.