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Blades of Glory Review
by Doom
guest starring John Madden
Will Ferrell plays eccentric person. What a stretch of the acting muscles!
Figure skaters wear gay costumes, joke #1 of 517
Blades of Glory is the latest (or not, since a new Ferrell abortion is birthed every 3 minutes) in a long line of fucking stupid, terrible Will Ferrell vehicles in which he mangles a sport. There was racing, and soccer, and now there's ice skating. Soon, he'll do basketball (no joke). Man, I don't know what I hate more, Will Ferrell or sports. Maybe I should split the difference and just say I hate Will Ferrell's conception of sports most of all. Okay. Yeah, that sounds fair. Here he co-stars with that guy who's known for being Napoleon Dynamite and nothing else. What's his name...that guy...Jon Heder. Will Ferrell plus guy from Napoleon Dynamite is not an equation which leads to a good film. You know it, I know it, the world knows it. Yet Blades of Glory was still made. What the fuck is wrong with Hollywood? Answer: nepotism and incompetence engulfs the region. Hence this idiotic bullshit existing. Goddamnit.
Once again, Will Ferrell plays a sex-obsessed, drunk boob who's great at one activity but shit at everything else. But Jon Heder plays against type because instead of being a horrible, socially-retarded nerd, he's a socially-retarded foppish gay. They get kicked out of Men's Singles and then find they can only return to the sport if they team-up in Pairs. A male-male pair? UH OH! They also hate each other, which does not help matters since pairs rely on their trust and teamwork for success. They must face off against the reigning champion pair of the figure skating world, Will Arnett and Amy Poehler, twins from some white part of Europe. Get it, in real life they are married, but here they are siblings! I wonder if they will hint at an incestuous relationship! Anyway, for sake of THE UNENDING MARCH OF THE PLOT, Ferrell and Heder become a great team after about 3 minutes of practicing together.
Straight men behaving homoerotically. I get it!
Much like Semi-Pro, which we reviewed earlier but chronologically occurred later, Blades of Glory tries for some emotion since all sports movies need to apparently have some drama, even though a comedy is a goddamn comedy. Jenna Fischer and Jon Heder fall for each other, kiss and then about a scene later this obviously long-lasting relationship gets thrown into flux, as the White Power twins force Jenna Fischer to seduce Will Ferrell. She doesn't, really, but Heder thinks she does, and so the Ferrell-Heder partnership loses a lot of trust. This happens all in about 15 minutes. She goes from his girlfriend to a seducing whore. And the wrench in the success is Napoleon Dynamite thinking Anchorman fondled his girlfriend's breasts. What a terrible fucking idea of a apple cart upsetting conflict. Christ. Such is the trouble of trying to force drama into a 90 minute comedy. A 90 minute bad comedy, no less.
The two eventually reconcile, perform the sport-defining move, win, and the evil Swiss pair lose, get arrested and finally reveal themselves as incestuous. Way to make the undercurrent obvious, movie. I can't believe I fucking wasted 90 minutes of my life watching Blades of Glory. Here's a list of things I could've done on a Friday night instead of this:
- Go to my girlfriend's apartment and fuck her
- Go to my girlfriend's apartment and fuck her and snuggle with her while watching DVDs of The Wire or The Sopranos or something
- Work on some articles not about Blades of Fucking Die Die Die Glory
- Go see a movie in theatres either by myself or with my girlfriend (even a bad movie is not Blades of Glory)
- Drink some liquor
- Play video games
- Read my Garth Ennis comics
- Listen to Del's 11th Hour (it gets better and more layered every time I listen!)
- Bitch about Ministry's totally faith destroying setlist for C-U-LaTour not containing any of the early 90s songs they've played a billion times already on the Piss Army message board
- Yell at Nerdlinger to finish his work
Though not all of those activities may seem fun or fulfilling to you, I think we can agree they are far superior than the pain suffered and the brain cells destroyed by 90 minutes of vitamin Blades of Glory.
The overarching theme here is "Homosexuality is disgusting and wrong". From the gay costumes to the unease everyone has about a male/male figure skating pair, Blades of Glory mines homosexuality for laughs, but of course in a way which does not disgust the people watching it. If one or both of the characters were gay it'd be sickening. But when they're two straight, straight men who love fucking pussy it's more than okay! As long as they ain't REAL queers, America doesn't have a problem with it. The only real gay in the movie is a disgusting stalker who has a lisp and wants to fuck Napoleon Dynamite. Blades of Glory's gayness does not involve itself in the narrative as much as the trailers and marketing would have you believe, but it's definitely there and noticeable. What's the point anymore? It's the 21st century; I don't think we need the "gays are funny" motion picture anymore. Or at least none as unoriginal, dumb and pointless (and which goes on for 90 punishing minutes) as Blades of Glory.
Now, I'm gonna go ahead and be honest by saying I'm not too big a fan of figure skating. Frankly, I can't wrap my head around it. Men and women skating around on ice for sporting and not just enjoyment? It's ludicrous. Baseball and basketball and football, those make sense. Figure skating doesn't. But that's just my opinion. Regardless, Blades of Glory is a total fumble for Ferrell from start to finish. He went from the success of Anchorman, a highly successful season if there ever was one, to Blades of Glory...this. Let me tell you why Blades of Glory was a bad idea for Ferrell. America doesn't like figure skating, Jon Heder's a bad second-string back-up, and the comedy is too undercooked to work. Why do I say undercooked? Well, you gotta understand something. The playbook for Blades of Glory is simultaneously old and weak. Gay jokes and crotch jokes and sex jokes. While this playbook would've been able to run the table in the 70s or 80s, today the comedy landscape takes into account more of the West Coast offense than just the old physical jokes and gay jokes. I think the box office anemia of Blades of Glory shows this was not a good move for Ferrell to make. Thankfully the Statue of Liberty play of Semi-Pro...wait...Semi-Pro? What the hell was that?
Thanks, Madden.
Blades of Glory features direction by Josh Gordon and Will Speck (Will Speck, not Richard Speck the transvestite birdman serial killer), two fucks who went on to direct as well as executive produce many episodes of Cavemen. Yeah. I think that says to you the lack of quality they exude more than anything I could possibly muster. But I'll mock anyway. These two have a direction style which is no style. It took me about 20 minutes just trying to think of what to say specifically about these talentless motherfuckers. They're, you know, bad comedy directors. They're interchangeable with all the other bad comedy directors in the business who aren't household names (read: Judd Apatow - he's bad, but you can tell what he directs and what his cronies direct in lieu of him). And since Blades of Glory is a sports movie, it falls into the same rubbish uninspiring melodrama direction all sports movies have to some extent or another, regardless of genre. Five people in total contributed to the writing side of this movie, and it shows insofar as the script is a muddled, mediocre mess with no sharp jokes or original ideas. It seems the team's bad ideas coalesced into one shitty compendium with no bite or reason to exist. Hackwork by committee at its worst, people.
Marky Mark's rap career is funnier than this.
Though all Will Ferrell pictures are essentially the same thing, you can tell which ones have writing by the man and which don't. Anchorman represents his comic sensibilities best - bad sex jokes, long, pointless diversions, ridiculous climaxes, casting his friends in supporting roles. Blades of Glory just feels bland and recycled and like all the other sports movie parodies which somehow become regular sports movies because bad comedy needs faux drama. You could pretty much remove Ferrell and throw in any SNL debris "star" and it'd be the same fucking film. Chris Kattan, Andy Lazy Sunday, Tracy Morgan, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, David Spade. Same movie. Not only that, this film could've been made in the 80s or 90s, by any director or writer, with minimal changes. It's a universal shitty experience.
GAYS ARE GAY
The film does unentertaining schtick so unentertaining I'm struggling to write this article. I really want to stop, but I figure I should at least give you readers a conclusion of sorts. Will Ferrell needs to stop doing cookie cutter shitty sports movies and Jon Heder needs to stop acting altogether. Neither are funny in their respective role and together they suck even more. I don't want to see Napoleon Dynamite in anything anymore ever and Will Ferrell needs to die so I can remember him fondly from the three SNL sketches of his I liked. BLADES OF GLORY SHOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED, DAMMIT.
How many drinks do I need for this to be good?: 291
Mastur-factor: -10
The Stinger: Jon Heder gets laid, or has the possibility of getting laid
sometime in the future. What the fuck.
Lesson Learned: FAGS FUNNY.