Movie Reviews: Blades of Glory

Directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck; Comedy; Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, language, a comic violent image, and some drug references; 93 min.

Skeptics will be quick to acknowledge that Will Ferrell has already starred in two sports movies and a fourth one is being filmed presently. The others will make Blades of Glory a large financial success, so it won't really matter what skeptics think.

Anyone can look at a movie like this with an overly critical eye, but there's really no point. Movies like this revolve around the likeability of the actors involved and how much the audience enjoys watching them spew absurd one-liners. Will Ferrell is back from his dramatic turn in Stranger Than Fiction and is furiously confident as arrogant, sex-obsessed skating legend, Chazz Michael Michaels. Jon Heder, who still is a couple movies away from no longer being known as the-guy-from-Napoleon-Dynamite, plays Jimmy MacElroy and compliments Ferrell's performance in many key banter scenes.

The story leaps right into a competition between Jimmy MacElroy and Chazz Michael Michaels, the two rival skating stars. They hate each other's guts and when they receive tied scores, a public fight between the two erupts. Banned from the sport for life, the two sink into miserable lives away from ice skating. A loophole is then discovered which allows the two to compete outside of their original division... which translates to Jimmy and Chazz struggling to become the first male-male paired ice skating team.

The most important piece of any "stupid comedy" is the pacing. Jokes have to fly often and quickly to fill in any gaps or moments where the previous joke fell flat. Fortunately, most of the one-liners range from smile-worthy to invoking chuckles. Blades of Glory is very much an audience movie, where it is best to see it in a large theater with a large number of people. The laughs within a theater generate an energy that compliments the fast-paced liveliness that is happening on screen.

Blades of Glory is also built on the strong foundation of plentiful supporting roles. Craig T. Nelson, Jenna Fischer, Amy Poehler, and Will Arnett all play significant supporting chunks. Poehler and Arnett play another pairs team who become the rivals of the movie. Fischer (best known as Pam from NBC's The Office) plays the subdued younger sister who shares a few hilarious scenes with the two as they attempt to inspire guilt using their parents' deaths as a ploy.

As long as movies like Blades of Glory maintain a certain sense of bumbling energy and loose fun, the genre will always provide brainless escapist entertainment. For this, the movie succeeds as a big stupid comedy that is worth the ninety minutes of your time.

Final Rating: 3 out of 5