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75Ultimately, we don't purchase tickets to Will Ferrell movies for their sweeping romantic storylines, but because he makes us laugh. And Semi-Pro offers plenty of reasons to do so.
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75Semi-Pro is so shabbily staged, shot and edited that it hardly ranks as a movie, much less a sports film, but hilarious people keep turning up in it.
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75None of Ferrell's movies have ever really done justice to the best of his "Saturday Night Live" work, but those of us who love his comedy have learned to take the good with the bad.
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Semi-Pro finds the sweet spot between sports melodrama and parody, and hammers it for 90 diverting minutes.
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70Very much in the tradition of "Slap Shot," George Roy Hill's raucously funny and foul-mouthed 1977 laffer about the misadventures of a minor-league hockey team, Semi-Pro scores big laughs with the rowdy play-by-play of hard-luck hoopsters struggling for professional survival.
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63Critics will score Semi-Pro on its missed shots. My guess is that audiences will do what they always do with Ferrell: remember when he killed them laughing.
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63Definitely more than semi-funny.
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63The problem with Semi-Pro is that it keeps forgetting it's a parody of sports movies; the final scenes are supposed to be uplifting (sort of) but they're not fooling anyone. The film's much better when it just lets the guys gas and sass each other.
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60The comedy is sloppy, crude and contains far too many misfires, but the film does capture the old ABA spirit in its ungainly struggles to wrestle laughs from seriously mediocre material.
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What at least distinguishes Semi-Pro from its predecessors (not only those starring Ferrell, but also such lesser lights as "Dodgeball" and "Balls of Fury") is that it's a slightly darker movie--one made for grown-ups, hence the R rating.
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60Harrelson and Maura Tierney, who plays Monix's love interest, seem to be inhabiting a different, more interesting, movie, one that follows the familiar path of a has-been athlete seeking redemption at what looks like his last stop. The strange thing is that the subplot is so tangential to the rest of the movie that the scenes could be omitted with no one the wiser.
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58Deserves credit for attempting something more emotional and dramatic than the typical Ferrell gagfest, but Harrelson and Benjamin's earnest subplots cost the film comic momentum and big laughs without adding much in return.
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50Mildly diverting and utterly dispensable.
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50The laughs do come, but not as readily, not as heartily and not as joyfully as you might expect.
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50The humor is mostly visual -- 70s relics like Pong, Shasta and men's platform shoes compete with the sight of Ferrell squeezed into tube socks and short shorts.
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50Instead of a satire, they give us a tired, tedious victory-for-the-underdog story, and the unevenness of Ferrell's comedy makes it less appealing.
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50Come to think of it, 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.
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50The semifunny Semi-Pro is amiable enough, but you never feel there's much at stake.
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42The big goofball relies too much on the funny hair and swingin' postures of the era as punchlines in themselves.
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Semi-Pro is the perfect name for this movie, because it feels like a half-baked comedy made by semi-professionals.
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40As Ferrell's films go, Semi-Pro is, honestly, pretty damn boring.
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40Andre Benjamin, Woody Harrelson, Maura Tierney and David Koechner -- all talented -- seem amazingly zombie-like here. And Jackie Earle Haley, as a stoner fan of the Tropics, is more disconcerting than funny.
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40There's no real reason it should be set in the 70s, except that the freaky wigs, loud clothes, and wall-to-wall soul classics are needed to bolster the nothing script.
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38The court scenes are rarely funny, either in the trash talk or the slapstick.
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38For 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.
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38Just Will Ferrell doing the same man-boy shtick he usually does.
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30This may be one of the most sluggish sports comedies ever made -- even the supposedly rousing final sequence feels belabored and chubby.
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25Goes 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?
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But basketball … basketball doesn't deserve the Ferrell treatment. Basketball is a sport of kings, a thing of beauty and elegance, America's game. Which doesn't mean that it shouldn't be mocked but that if it must be mocked it deserves to be mocked well, and Semi-Pro, unfortunately, isn't up to the challenge.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 22 out of 43
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Mixed: 11 out of 43
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Negative: 10 out of 43
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