Blades of Glory (2007)

DVD, Seattle, WA

September 01, 2007

* / ****

From that yucks a few comedy machine Saturday Night Live, we have yet another inferior cinematic product: Blades of Glory. With a name that brings to mind the glorious Nintendo game from the ‘80s, Blades of Steel, and featuring he of the tirelessly redundant shtick, Will Ferrell, Napoleon Dynamite, himself, John Heder, and the most annoying SNL actress of the last decade, attention hog Amy Poehler, this is a movie that struggles for laughs even as it hurls an unending amount of attempts at its audience. Throw in Ben Stiller as Producer and you’ve got a guaranteed hit with Generation X and another Stiller turkey on my movie radar. Gobble, gobble.

Blades of Glory tells the story of champion figure skaters Chaz Michael Michaels (Ferrell) and Jimmy MacElroy (Heder), men’s individual rivals and personality opposites who find themselves banned from the sport after brawling on the podium following a world championship event. Citing a loophole in their banishment, MacElroy’s coach, played by Craig T. Nelson, concocts a plan to unite the hated enemies as a male/male pairs team and take the skating world by storm. Reluctantly agreeing to the plan and working together as best they can while tormented by a rival brother/sister team, played by Poehler and tall drink of water, Will Arnett, Poehler’s real life hubby, the odd couple give us all the required gay sight gags before inevitably skating their way to pairs championship glory.

Those who laugh heartily at this film flummox me. I can only imagine they laugh because they are desperate for humour and prepared to chuckle at just about anything. Sure, the jokes fly at a rate of about 1 per second but the majority of these gags are neither funny nor intelligent, silly nor well timed but rather, lobbed rapid fire without restraint, cunning, or any seeming sense of rhythm or rhyme. Having two directors could easily do that to a production, and Josh Gordon and Will Speck seem to be doing just that as they allow their actors to do seemingly whatever they want causing the movie to suffer big time as a result. Adding to the tragedy, straight man Craig T. Nelson is so out of place here that even his bald mullet fails to get a laugh. His old TV comedy Coach was a funny show so why all the trouble fitting in here? The answer is obvious: this movie stinks.

Constructed to make a quick buck at the Cineplex, rake in those mindless Saturday night DVD rental bucks, as well cash in on the hot-at-the-moment Ferrell and Heder momentum, Blades of Glory is a film that takes a one-note premise and beats it thoroughly for an hour and a half. Sure, Blades of Glory will disappear from your psyche forever within moments of the credits, but its impact, I dare say will last a lifetime, adding fuel to the fire of the never ending crap parade of Saturday Night Live cinematic offerings. Like death and taxes, it seems, lousy SNL movies will forever remain a fact of life eating our minds and corrupting our souls. Yuck, yuck, yuck.