After almost a year away from the big screen (the equivalent of five or six years for comedians), Will Farrell (Blades of Glory, Stranger Than Fiction,  Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Kicking and Screaming, Elf), is back in yet another sports-themed comedy, Semi-Pro, a riff on the long-gone, somewhat-missed American Basketball Association (ABA) that folded in 1976. The NBA absorbed four  teams, the Denver Nuggets, the New York Nets, the Indiana Pacers, and the San Antonio Spurs, with the remainder consigned to basketball oblivion. The not-quite-rightly-titled Semi-Pro, takes a fictitious team, the misnamed Flint Tropics, and drops them into the ABA’s last season. Semi-Pro being a comedy, Farrell and his co-stars mine the premise for every ounce of humor and then some. Unfortunately, that only gets us to the 45-minute mark, with another, sporadically excruciating 45 minutes to go before we can safely exit the movie theater.

Flint, Michigan, 1976. One-time pop-star (a.k.a., a one-hit wonder) turned basketball owner, coach, and star player, Jackie Moon (Will Ferrell), sees his dream of the Tropics merging with the NBA shattered when the ABA commissioner (David Koechner) informs the owners of the ABA teams that four teams and only four teams will make the jump to the NBA and the Flint Tropics aren’t one of those teams. Moon throws a temper tantrum, but somehow manages to convince the other owners to let the teams with the four best records become NBA teams. The Tropics, however, are mired near the bottom of the standings. Moon returns to Michigan and gives his team, Clarence 'Coffee' Black (André "3,000" Benjamin), the real star of the team, Bee Bee Ellis (DeRay Davis), Scootise Double Day (Jay Phillips), Twiggy Munson (Josh Braaten), and Vakidis (Peter Cornell), his chief assistant, Bobby Dee (Andy Richter), and his two salty-tongued announcers Dick Pepperfield (Andrew Daly) and Lou Redwood (Will Arnett), the low-down.

As insanely optimistic as Moon is about his team’s prospects for joining the NBA, Moon quickly realizes that he needs to bring a more experienced player to take his team to the next level. Moon trades the team’s washing machine to the Kentucky Colonels for a former NBA point guard, Monix (Woody Harrelson). Literally on his last legs (okay, just the one with the bum knee), Monix has few illusions about what he and the Tropics can accomplish, but a rekindled romance with an ex-girlfriend, Lynn (Maura Tierney), convinces him to straighten up and play the game of basketball they way it should be played: with passion, heart, and all-out effort. Monix also discovers a talent for coaching, but he has to overcome the players’ resistance and Moon’s easily bruised ego.

Helmed by producer-turned-first-time director Kent Alterman with about as much style and flair as you’d expect from a former producer-turned-director (in other words, none or next to none), Semi-Pro succeeds or fails on the strength of screenwriter Scot Armstrong’s (The Heartbreak Kid, School for Scoundrels, Starsky & Hutch, Old School, Road Trip) script and, surprise, surprise, Will Farrell’s performance as the temperamental, egotistical, dim-witted, unrealistically optimistic Jackie Moon. Alas, Moon won’t be remembered as one of Farrell’s better attempts at character creation, mostly because Moon is a carbon copy of every character Farrell’s played over the last five or six years. Sadly, Farrell’s shtick is starting to look and feel worn out and Armstrong’s hit-or-miss screenplay doesn’t help much either.

That’s not to say Semi-Pro is a semi-worthless (sorry, couldn’t resist) waste of time. It won’t be for Farrell’s hardcore fans (you know who you are) or fans of the NBA and basketball history. It doesn’t hurt that Semi-Pro works the 70s nostalgia angle for all its worth, so get ready for Afros, sideburns, big-collared, unbuttoned shirts, hideous patterns, bell-bottoms, and funk stylings on the soundtrack. When the nostalgia wears off, the coarse, crude, rude, and raunchy humor kicks in. Not surprisingly, some of the funniest jokes come fast and early, none no better than a drunken variation on Russian Roulette or basketball fan who gets off on, well, his favorite player getting off with the fan’s girlfriend no less. Alas (there’s that word again), the jokes and gags eventually give way to the losers-win-against-the-odds storyline we’ve seen countless times before (and we’ll see countless times) again.

Why, though, Farrell and Alterman went for an "R" rating instead of a “PG-13” rating for Semi-Pro is hard to fathom. Considering that a significant number of his fans are under eighteen, he's limiting Semi-Pro's demographic reach and all because he wanted to throw in the occasional F-bomb or c*cksucker into the dialogue. Why take the risk against Semi-Pro's box office potential, especially when judicious removal of the F-bombs would have gotten Semi-Pro a "PG-13" rating? If you're going for the "R," then why not go all out and include gratuitous T&A or, at least, better choreographed basketball action? Obviously Alterman had to work around Farrell's limitations as a basketball player, but a more inventive director would have found ways around that. Alterman wasn't and isn’t that director. As for Farrell, he needs to bring his “A” game next time out and not his “C” game as does in Semi-Pro.

© Mel Valentin, February 29th, 2008