Fratpack comics Jon Heder and Will Ferrell have had some dodgy outings in the past year with, respectively, a terrible School For Scoundrels remake and a piece of sub-Kaufman noodling called Stranger Than Fiction. It's a relief to see them back in this serviceably funny underdog sports movie - the kind of thing that suits them best, or suits Ferrell best, at any rate: big, broad, elaborately detailed comedy characters in the Saturday Night Live tradition. They play egomaniac rivals in the narcissistic world of men's figure skating, an arena of sparkly spandex costumes on the ice and foot-stamping tantrums and seething resentments backstage.
Heder is Jimmy MacElroy, an absurdly vain peacock of a skater with a figure-hugging, powder-blue outfit and blowdried blond hair. He has an appallingly affected routine that involves imitating a peacock on the ice and finally releasing a dove, somehow secreted within his skin-tight getup. His hated enemy is Chazz Michael Michaels, played by the permanently sweaty Ferrell: a skater with a James Brown hairdo and a sensual beergut, who insists on his own brash brand of bad-boy heterosexuality. He is proud of the fact that he is the only skater to have won Olympic medals and adult movie awards. The two titans of skating fatefully meet when they are forced to share the gold medal position on the podium at the Stockholm championships.
They get involved in a queeny brawl after much pushing and shoving and shrill demands to "scoot over". Because of the disgrace, Jimmy and Chazz get a lifetime ban. Inevitably, there are the scenes showing these fallen hombres of the ice in their degradation: Jimmy sells skates to little girls in a sporting goods store, and Chazz has to play a wizard in a kids' ice show. Constantly drunk, he reaches his nadir when he throws up inside his giant wizard mask and starts shouting abuse, but has to keep wobbling about the rink to the children's bafflement and growing disgust. Finally, a loophole is discovered. The two guys are not banned from partner-skating. If they can put aside their differences and skate together in an unprecedented boy-boy combo, they have a chance at redemption. But, as one sceptic wearily remarks: "Isn't skating gay enough?"
Ferrell has already worked the comeback-kid storyline in Anchorman and Talladega Nights, but with enough gags, comedy training montages and funny secondary characters, it always works perfectly well, even if Heder is always in danger of getting eclipsed by Ferrell, that one-man macho-comedy delivery system. They are both faced with a scene-stealing turn from Will Arnett and Amy Poehler as the creepy brother-sister skating team, Stranz and Fairchild Van Waldenberg, a pampered duo forever trying to introduce inappropriate levels of eroticism into their work and whose professional climax comes with a horrifically misjudged ice-dance creation based on the forbidden relationship between John F Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.
There is a steady stream of laughs and narrative interest. Blades isn't quite as funny as Zoolander or Dodgeball, but it deserves a solid score from the judges.
