An Underrated Will Ferrell Comedy Is Now Crushing On Streaming
An underrated and mostly forgotten Will Ferrell comedy is currently moving quickly up the streaming charts. Check this one out
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When thinking about the best Will Ferrell movies, there are almost too many to choose from. Maybe you are an Anchorman fan, loving the surreally ridiculous adventures of Ron Burgundy. Or maybe you just can’t get enough of Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights and his trips around the track. It could be the holidays and you just need to watch him as Buddy in Elf for the 100th time. The dude has so many great roles to choose from with the comedic resume among the best ever. But one of his forgotten movies is making its way up the streaming charts right now. Blades of Glory is currently sitting at #9 on HBO Max right now, cracking the top-10 for the first time on the streaming platform.
Blades of Glory follows a somewhat popular theme for Will Ferrell over the years, putting him in a quasi-sports role in a way you’d never really expect if you met the dude in real life. But he’s made it work over the years, clearly able to take on the physical aspects of these kinds of flicks while offering up a hilarious juxtaposition because of how he looks. In this one he plays Chazz Michael Michaels, a professional figure skater who at one point is at the very top of the on-ice game, evening competing in the Olympics. But things go south when he gets in a fight with his rival Jimmy MacElroy (Jon Heder) which results in both of them being banned from the sport. Check out the trailer for Blades of Glory, which you can catch streaming on HBO Max:
Living different lives off the ice, the two figure out that though they can no longer compete on a professional level for individual skating, the ban doesn’t apply to the doubles game. And they end up forming a tenuous, and hilarious partnership. What ensues is something that could only come up in a comedy writer’s room. They are working their way back onto the ice and dealing with all of the ridiculous innuendo that could come from a movie in the early aughts.
You can see that no punches are pulled with how far this pair is willing to take things in order to get back on the Olympic podium. Is any of it, in any way, believable? Of course not. That’s kind of the point. And it’s hammered home when we see Will Ferrell, in all his paunchy glory, standing in the kitchen asking Heder to see what a figure skater’s body really looks like. This kind of faux-confidence in the face of the real truth (he’s completely out of shape) has been a time-honored piece of Ferrell’s comedy. He’s always feigned like he is the most attractive, athletic, and gifted one in the room when everyone can see that’s clearly not the case. It’s one of the backbones of his comedy and it comes all the way through in Blades of Glory.
In addition to Will Ferrell and Jon Heder, Blades of Glory has plenty of other notables as part of the cast. Will Arnett and Amy Poehler play Stranz and Fairchild Van Waldenberg, the brother-sister skating team who are sitting at the top of the field before Michaels and MacElroy make their way onto the ice. Jenna Fischer is here as well, playing their younger sibling sent to seduce the male-male skating team. Others include Craig T. Nelson as the new coach and William Fichtner as MacElroy’s adoptive father. Plus there’s Rob Corddry, Andy Richter, Luke Wilson, and Romany Malco. Real-like figure skaters Nancy Kerrigan, Scott Hamilton, Brian Boitano, Dorothy Hamill, Peggy Fleming, and Sasha Cohen are here as well.
Directed by Will Speck and Josh Gordon (The Switch, Office Christmas Party), Blades of Glory performed moderately well at the box office, scoring $146 million on its $61 million budget when it hit theaters in 2007. Much of this was on the back of Ferrell’s massive fame. He had come out with Talladega Nights the previous year and Anchorman just a few years prior. And it was a hit with critics as well, scoring 70% on Rotten Tomatoes and 64 on Metacritic, both solid numbers for a comedy of this type.
In all, it makes sense that Will Ferrell would be seeing a second life on streaming with Blades of Glory. The film works on a number of different levels and takes advantage of everything the star does well on the big screen. And now that we are gearing up for the Winter Olympics, now is the perfect time to revisit the film in all its, well, glory.
