? Rival male figure skaters (Will Ferrell, Jon Heder), banned from singles competition, team up as the first male duo to compete in pairs skating.
+ This sort of comedy makes no pretensions to depth, and just a little to character development, so it has to succeed or fail solely on the laugh quotient. Given the high-concept premise, it would have been easy to simply fill 90 minutes with pratfalls, visual humor, and jokes about homosexual panic. While those aren’t missing, there’s some variety. Ferrell, as Chazz Michael Michaels, plays a variation of the swaggering types he essayed in Anchorman and Talladega Nights, his other comedies set in particular subcultures. Much of the humor comes from the contrast with Heder’s timid Jimmy. When the reluctant partners argue about who will be “the girl” when they skate, Chazz says that it should be Jimmy because “I don’t have a vagina.” (Shying away from the obvious implications of that, the producers have been sure to provide Jimmy with a love interest, played by Jenna Fischer of The Office.) Other aspects of the story play on the old Tanya Harding saga. (Harding’s victim, Nancy Kerrigan, is among the real-life skaters who appear briefly as themselves.)
- Perhaps because, unlike Anchorman and Talladega, this isn’t a collaboration between Ferrell and writing partner Adam McKay, the story is just a little more perfunctory here. The rival skating duo (Will Arnett, Amy Poehler) and the coach (Craig T. Nelson) have their moments, but overall they’re stock characters following a predictable plot. You also get the feeling that nobody among the credited five writers and two directors knows much about competitive skating. In one sequence, Chazz and Jimmy manage to get all perfect and near-perfect scores despite a nasty fall.
= **3/4 Forgettably pleasant comic comfort food.
IMDB link
reviewed 4/6/07
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