[Jt]

Well I wrote this for the newspaper the other day. If any of you are thinking of seeing Blades Of Glory/getting it on DVD:

. . .Will Ferrell. Ice skating. Crotches. You can guess the rest – a patchy frat-pack vehicle pitching Ferrell alongside Jon Heder (of Napoleon Dynamite fame) in what will likely amount to one of the biggest comedy films of the year. Bearing all the hallmarks of a cut-price Anchorman (sans cameos from Ben Stiller and the boys, though Stiller himself produces here), Blades Of Glory represents a thoroughly mindless 93-minute dissection of the contradiction in terms presented by an overtly macho, self-confessed sex addict pairing up with an effeminate, kind-hearted orphan for a bout of all-male paired figure skating.
. . . Jimmy MacElroy (Heder), the adopted son of billionaire horse breeder Danny MacElroy and raised solely for figure skating success, finds himself upstaged at the WinterSport Games (ostensibly the Winter Olympics) by one Chazz Michael Michaels (Ferrell) and his raunchy routine. A fracas on the podium ensues, resulting in a lifetime ban from the sport for the pair. Naturally, a psychotic fan of MacElroy’s, Hector (Nick Swardson), intervenes with the all-important discovery of a loophole – the bans only apply to the singles category.
. . .The resulting journey back to the ice for the two provides its fair share of guffaws as first-time directors Will Speck and Josh Gordon have endeavoured to render each scene more farcical than the last, with anything from Michaels’ constant leering (“''You an official here? Because you have officially given me a boner!'') to high-octane chases in ice skates on dry land providing the fun. The problem of course is that we’ve seen all of this before - the same rudimentary high-low-higher story arc providing the basis for Ferrell’s previous two outings – and there’s precious little added to the formula this time around (save an extra layer of homoeroticism) to mask what’s essentially a one-joke wonder with an hour-long punchline. Still, if the sight of a paunchy spandex-clad comedian on ice sounds like a lark to you, you could do worse than this Ferrell-by-numbers effort. Kick some ice.

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