APRIL 11, 2008 - VOL. 1, ISSUE 10

Look at the commercials for Semi-Pro and you've basically seen everything appealing about the film: Will Ferrell plays a guy with a silly name, an afro, and wears short basketball shorts. The film plays like a brainstorming session between the creators of the film, with gems like, "Hey, wouldn't it be hilarious if we had an afro-clad Will Ferrell wrestling a bear?" Will Ferrell, ever the sport, went along with it. That's it. The whole film is a series of "Wouldn't it be hilarious if (insert sort of funny idea here)?" and the scenes are thinly strung together by a poorly thought out plot.

It's all too easy to get disgusted with the nearly nonexistent plot. The attempts at recreating the magic of Anchorman verges on blasphemy, but there was a redeeming factor that I reminded myself of throughout the film. Semi-Pro takes place in Flint, Michigan.

Most of the movie was filmed in Flint. Today, it is one of the most tragic cities in America. The city has been given the short end of the stick numerous times. As noted by Michael Moore in nearly all of his documentaries, especially Roger and Me, Flint is one of the primary victims of deindustrialization. The city started to decline with the fall of the American auto industry and with the 1973 oil crisis. In 1978, there were nearly 80,000 employees with General Motors' Flint factories. As of 2006, there were not quite 8,000.

The movie takes place in 1976, right before the height of Flint's employment rate. The film focuses primarily on a fictitious basketball team, the Flint Tropics, and their decline within the next year. This could be huge for Semi-Pro! The movie could all be a giant allusion to the decline of Flint, a city whose fair chance got screwed over by Reaganomics and outsourcing. Finally, a non-Michael Moore approach to revealing the wrongs that happened to this city.

But that's not what the movie does. At all. They take any hint of that and hide it behind lackluster performances by Will Arnette, Woody Harrelson, Andre "3000" Benjamin, Rob Corddry, David Koechner, Andy Richter, and Tim Meadows. The film is just a series of unfunny vignettes. I like all of these actors quite a bit, and they do their best, but the script gives them nothing to work with. OK, so sometimes it's hilarious to see Will Ferrell sing a 1970s soul hit called "Love Me Sexy," but who cares?

What's more, this movie didn't have to be in Flint. It could've been in Utah somewhere. They essentially picked the town because it's a small town in the Midwest that wouldn't likely have a basketball team. They figured that was funny, and considering Flint has at least some name recognition, they chose it. There isn't any social statement made about the city's downfall at all. Flint was picked as one in a number of cities that could be dubbed "Nowhere, U.S.A." and the Tropics are supposed to be a bizarre take on the ABA's Kentucky Kernels. Flint is a crutch and isn't there to represent any industrial collapse.

The movie begins with Jackie Moon and the Flint Tropics, an ABA team, playing a game to an almost empty audience. At this point in watching the film, I say to myself, "OK, so now they're going to shut down the ABA, so Jackie and the guys strike up a scheme to get the team in the NBA. This plan obviously fails, but no matter, they'll all live happily ever after with other careers."

And that is exactly what happens. It took me about ten minutes to figure that out. But the creators of this film clearly don't care about the plot. Otherwise, they would've spent some time to create a good one. There are some pretty confusing and useless back-stories about Benjamin's character and his NBA aspirations and the love life of Harrelson’s character, but they ultimately amount to nothing and leave me feeling apathetic. The plot is inane—the film is about the "hilarious" vignettes of comedy that occur between the four plot points the film has to work with.

The vast majority of the scenes don’t pull the plot along; they're just there. It's like somebody vomited a joke and it landed on the page, everybody laughed at it, and it ended up in the movie. There's one scene where Ferrell decides to jump over the team's cheerleaders, a la Evel Knievel, and lands on one of them. I have no idea where this fits into the plot, considering it could've been thrown in anywhere.

Does Hollywood think that we can only digest thirty second to five minute sequences of lazily written comedy? Has YouTube inspired Hollywood's screenwriters to make their movies into a series of viral comedy? To be frank, if there's a thirty or forty minute video on YouTube, it seems far too faunting. I'll gladly take a 15-second clip of a baby laughing over a thirty-minute sitcom. Perhaps this just means I have a short attention span. Regardless, I think the writers of this movie could've worked much harder at making the jokes and the plot meld together a little better. With a movie format, you don’t have the luxuries of YouTube. You can't rely on viral comedy to get you through ninety minutes. Even "Family Guy" pulls off vignettes of comedy better than this movie manages. At least Seth MacFarlane purposely leaves the cut-away bits separate from the plot, where Semi-Pro desperately grabs for anything in the scene to tie into the plot.

There were still aspects of the film that I could appreciate, but they all occurred outside of the script and off screen. My heart was warmed, in the end, when I thought about the six days of filming that happened in Flint. My admiration goes out to the cast of the film, particularly Ferrell and Harrelson, who frequently showed their appreciation of the community in the media. There are accounts of Harrelson talking to fans in the area and signing autographs. The Flint Journal ran an interview with Ferrell that discussed his positive impressions of Flint. It's nice to know that Ferrell treasured his experience filming outside of Hollywood. I just wish this actually translated into the film.

Before watching Semi-Pro, I could have guaranteed that the movie would at some point include seeing Will Ferrell naked and a throwback celebrity cameo (in this case, Patti Labelle played Jackie's mom in a brief scene). The movie is predictable, pointless, and unfortunate. If it weren't for my fascination with Flint, I would have walked away from the movie. I sat and waited for the film to make an allusion to the deindustrialization of Flint, but it never happened. The spark that drove Anchorman to greatness is completely absent for this one. Semi-Pro is nothing more than a collection of buzzwords that made it into a screenplay.