Semi-Pro

If you’ve seen any of the ubiquitous trailers you’ve already been treated to some of the movie’s best moments (some of which didn’t make it into the final cut).

Will Ferrell and his merry band of acolytes again prove there's nothing they won't do for laughs in their latest sports comedy, Semi-Pro.

While there's nothing groundbreaking in this new '70s-set Will Ferrell sports comedy, first-time director Kent Alterman relies on Ferrell's comedy chops and a strong supporting cast to create an engaging, if imperfect, film.

Even when Will Ferrell's not funny, the audience stays with him. There's a reason for that. Ferrell is fearless. He goofs around on film like many of us would love to if we had no inhibition filter.

Aimed squarely at the mostly male hordes who made Talladega Nights and Blades of Glory as obligatory a duo as beer and pizza, Semi-Pro isn't about to risk the franchise on anything as foolish as originality.

The pacing and the staging are lackadaisical at best, but the virtue of this film's looseness it that is has some of the airy unpredictability of the best late-night TV comedy.

Will Ferrell is pretty much the whole show, although a rather humorless Woody Harrelson also puts in the time as a former NBA benchwarmer.

The Will Ferrell comedy has become a reliable movie genre unto itself. You know the jokes will be hit-and-miss.

Semi-Pro is an underdog sports comedy in the vein Major League but with a far more developed sense of humor.

There are some huge laughs in the movie, and as per usual the film offers an insightful (if similarly familiar) portrait of blustery, ignorant masculinity, which no one currently does better than Will Ferrell.

While occasionally funny and often amusing, Semi-Pro seems so much like a Saturday Night Live sketch stretched to the breaking point, you will wonder if you’ve been tricked into paying 10 bucks to watch a television show.

The basketball's bad and the comedy's uneven, but the bit players shine and Will Ferrell occasionally shoots a three-pointer. A total mess that's nothing but a good time

The movie itself is pretty much what we've come to expect from Will Ferrell, which suggests it's time to reboot the franchise.

Ultimately, Semi-Pro relies too heavily on routine sex gags or jokes with cursing as the punch line. Will Ferrell is in familiar territory reprising his one-trick, loud-and-clueless-man shtick.

As a collection of sight gags and droll observations about life at the low end of the professional sports food chain, Semi-Pro is frequently a thigh-slapping hoot.

Will Ferrell may not be one of our great comic minds, but he does offer competent and consistent impersonations of other parts of the human anatomy -- funny bone included.

The real problem with Semi-Pro, about a raggedy-ass ABA hoops team dying from dumbass incompetence and fan neglect in 1976, is that it's only semifunny.

The remarkable thing about Will Ferrell's comedies isn't how funny they sometimes are. The remarkable thing is how little apparent aspiration goes into the creation of Ferrell's recurring line of lamebrains.

I laughed from start to finish at its relentlessly, energetically profane absurdity and a cast crammed with funny actors in even the smallest roles.

Although Semi-Pro is always more about comedy than sports, the film's basketball action is convincing.

Will Ferrell's latest sports spoof is significantly better than his last attempt, Blades of Glory, though not as inspired as Anchorman.

Will Ferrell fans will experience a distinct sense of déjà vu watching his new laugher Semi-Pro, and not just because Ferrell is following up Talladega Nights, Kicking & Screaming, and Blades Of Glory with another jock comedy.

Semi-Pro is precisely that: a movie that is sort of professionally made and sort of professionally acted with no serious expectations beyond earning money and offering audience members some passing entertainment.

Being a Will Ferrell flick, the film must contain lots and lots of his sleazy-charming knucklehead mugging for the camera and, of course, off-color and gross jokes.

A big dumb movie that would have no right to exist without its star, but provides him more than enough chances to do his thing.

Will Ferrell again tackles his patented, crowd-pleasing, larger-than-life child-man in Semi-Pro, this time playing the coach and star forward of a basketball team that’s on the skids.

With a movie like Semi-Pro, it's all about the laughs. If it's funny, it's good, and if it's not funny, it's bad. The rest of the conversation is just about figuring out why.

Let's put it in basketball terms: You look at the cast and its track record and think, slam dunk, easy. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few funny scenes, Semi-Pro plays more like a blown lay-up.

Are those pit stains on Will Ferrell's shtick? After four jock-themed comedies in three years, Semi-Pro -- his latest reiteration of growth-stunted masculinity -- can't help but make you feel it's time he benched the routine.

Semi-Pro is a movie about adult athletes, but the relentless locker-room language seems out of place in a silly movie that probably will find its most appreciative audience among 12-year-old boys.

Appropriately enough, Semi-Pro lives up to half of its title. That would be the "semi" part.

Judging from this low-scoring sports comedy about the mystique of men with balls, Will Ferrell needs to call a time-out from belly baring to refocus his fan-favorite game of playing clueless male doofuses.

The only so-so Semi-Pro just proves Will Ferrell, although being one of the funnier people on the planet, definitely needs new material.

Semi-Pro starts with a funny idea but fails to deliver on its promise.

Everything about it is semi: semi-funny, semi-idiotic and semi-conceived after a long night of Bud Lights and viewings of Talladega Nights.

Semi-Pro is an indulgent movie about an indulgent era tailor-made for an indulgent audience.

The humor is just too scattershot; the tone, too uneven. The unsolicited glimpses of Will Ferrell's pale, flabby body less funny than usual.

Mildly diverting and utterly dispensable, Semi-Pro stars Will Ferrell as the coach/owner/forward of the Tropics, a Michigan hoops franchise in 1976, the waning days of the American Basketball Association.

Semi-Pro is a test of how many slipshod retreads Will Ferrell fans will buy. With or without Michael Moore, you should be able to get better vehicles in Flint.

You always know exactly what you're getting with a Will Ferrell movie. A large, hairy, garishly attired man -- utterly convinced of his sexy awesomeness -- will learn that pride goeth before the fall.

Director Kent Alterman knows how to hammer home a joke, and let us assume he has merely chosen not to work in any degree of subtlety.

If it looks as if Will Ferrell is just going through the motions in this raunchy sports comedy, it's because he's done this all before.

Semi-Pro is the perfect name for this movie, because it feels like a half-baked comedy made by Semi-Professionals.

Erratic, overlong and repetitive, Semi-Pro seems not to have been written but sketched out in chalkboard diagrams before the actors took their marks in front of the cameras.

The humor is mostly visual -- 70s relics like Pong, Shasta and men's platform shoes compete with the sight of Will Ferrell squeezed into tube socks and short shorts.

Stranger Than Fiction showed that Ferrell can actually act, but Semi-Pro and its clones are too lucrative, I guess, for him to stop making them.

You would get just as many laughs by staring at a blank wall for 90 minutes as you would by watching this movie.

Semi-Pro tries for semi-sweet when bittersweet would have been better, semi-silly when full-bore absurd was called for. And the final score? Semi-funny.

Semi-Pro is just Will Ferrell doing the same man-boy shtick he usually does.

Like so much in this life, Will Ferrell's comedies tread the razor-thin line separating smart/stupid from stupid/stupid.

Technically, it's not a foul to shoot a stupid sports comedy. In fact, it's becoming something of a routine maneuver for Will Ferrell.

The movie itself leaps onto the screen and makes goofy faces at you without being either funny or involving.

Whether you're a Will Ferrell fan or not, Semi-Pro is unlikely to end up on your list of favorite movies.

Perhaps the feeblest entry in the Will Ferrell Sports Comedy canon.

Semi-Pro goes up for the dunk and misses the hoop, the backboard and the point. Instead, it manages to both strike out and get sacked. Whose idea was it to remake Slap Shot a la Jerry Lewis?

Maybe Will Ferrell is beyond criticism. Maybe any man willing to show millions of viewers his underpants in the name of comedy should be.