Movie Review: Blades of Glory
In this jaded age, it seems unlikely that any mainstream movie can force a fresh mix of grossed-out groans and laughter from an audience. But Blades of Glory did just that at a local screening on Tuesday.
The gag involves a bathroom, a waste-paper basket and handcuffs, and I'll save the rest for when you see it. Still, I did laugh, and it wasn't the only time Blades made me do so.
This is a movie so comfortable in its own stupidity that it requires no depth or emotional commitment from the audience -- less even than the similarly designed Dodgeball.
In fact, compared with Blades, Dodgeball begins to feel like a sensitive character study, a little wimpy where Blades is fearless.
Blades stars Will Ferrell and Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder as figure skaters and bitter rivals. Heder's Jimmy MacElroy is an embodiment of figure-skating cliches: grace, polish, routines done to classical music and a style that even on men feels feminine. (Blond-haired and full-lipped, Jimmy is all too easily mistaken for a woman.) Ferrell's Chazz Michael Michaels is the antithesis: macho, sexually aggressive, skating to Billy Squier.
As the movie begins, Jimmy and Chazz have a public brawl that gets them both banned from skating. After three years in miserable exile, they learn about a loophole allowing them to skate -- but only together, in pairs competitions that of late have been ruled by the brother-sister combo of Stranz and Fairchild Van Waldenburg (Will Arnett and Amy Poehler).
The duel with Stranz and Fairchild satisfies the need for a plot in the movie, though -- as is often the case with outrageous comedies -- Blades of Glory fades when the time comes to resolve the plot.
It is also awkward in those brief moments when the characters are asked to be something other than cartoons. Jenna Fischer, so good as Pam on The Office, doesn't fit well with the other players because she plays a human being. Her emotions seem too real, her delivery of lines too steady.
The greater pleasure comes from the extended outrageousness by Ferrell. However good he was as the restrained star of Stranger Than Fiction, Ferrell is back in the manic mode of films like Talladega Nights (and is better in Blades than he was in that comedy blockbuster).
Ferrell overwhelms everything around him on-screen, and does so in a way that makes you wonder how much came from the movie's five writers and how much from Ferrell himself.
Heder is a capable foil, but Jimmy's mildness keeps him from being much more than that. Real-life couple Arnett and Poehler are reasonably funny, only they've had better material elsewhere; a lot of their humor comes from their wardrobe.
Still, the skating routines are so nutty that anyone forced to sit through a Winter Olympics is going to laugh. And they had to bring grins to the real-life skaters dotting the film. (They are Dorothy Hamill, Nancy Kerrigan, Brian Boitano and -- in a scene sure to give people a new impression of her -- Sasha Cohen.) And the inevitable gags built around vomit and groin kicks are offered in ways that make them feel funny in spite of their countless predecessors.
Yes, that means that large parts of Blades are adolescent and gross. It is consistently and unrepentantly a stupid movie. But if you're looking for a laugh, seeing Blades could still be a very smart move.
