(Happy suburbanite who just gets in trouble when exposed to the seedier side of life.) This movie makes you want to force everyone in it to get a haircut and a real job. Abrams in supporting roles - and Ferrell is completely wasted in a test run for his Old School role. This is ’90s grungy excess at its absolute worst - though it’s funny to see a doing-a-favor Ben Stiller and just-starting-out J.J. If Lucy Fell’s Eric Schaeffer is the most famous purveyor of this, and his My Life’s in Turnaround partner Donal Lardner Ward wrote and directed this DOA “comedy” about an ’80s band (led by Ward, featuring Ferrell as the bassist) that gets back together when a rock-label seductress (Jennifer Love Hewitt, naturally) puts them on a reality show.
#Dylan vox movies series#
In case you forgot, the mid-to-late-’90s film featured a series of floppy-haired, dopey white nerds writing and starring in self-aggrandizing, amateurish, winsome “indie comedies” about how difficult it is for winsome, dopey white nerds to find love. Reilly, like co-stars Rebecca Hall and Ralph Fiennes, looks a little confused about what’s supposed to be going on here. There’s no real angle on Sherlock here: Is he a genius? A buffoon? There’s not enough thought put into this other than let Will and John be silly, and that is not nearly enough. Reilly is back to try to recapture the old Step Brothers magic, and as game as he is, trying to get the band back together just reveals how oddly wooden and inflexible Farrell is becoming. Remember how, in that SNL book, Ferrell represented the hip future of comedy, mocking the smug boomer shtick of a Chevy Chase? Ferrell has never felt, well, older than he does here, doing a silly Sherlock Holmes accent, vamping like crazy and basically sucking all the air out of every room he walks into. Okay, it’s probably officially time to worry.
What if you threw an improv-comedy movie but no one bothered to show up? This is what happens. Ferrell can barely be roused from his slumber he seems exhausted and depressed, and it’s sort of hard to blame him. Andrew Jay Cohen’s incompetent direction - the movie doesn’t even build up to jokes, let alone follow them through - leads to an airless, desperate comedy in which every cast member is stranded. Has Ferrell ever looked this dispirited and listless? What sounds like a solid, if high-concept, premise - a couple attempt to pay for their daughter’s college by setting up a casino in their suburban neighborhood - is DOA here, quite possibly the worst movie everyone involved has ever been in.
Which movie best captures the Will Ferrell Experience? As always, this list is purely scientific and unassailable. This list isn’t solely a ranking of the best films to feature Ferrell, though there’s an aspect of that it’s more a ranking of the films by their maximizing of Ferrell’s essence. And no glorified cameos - sorry, Wedding Crashers, Starsky & Hutch, and, yikes, Boat Trip. Now, to properly rank Ferrell movies, we had to put down some ground rules: No movies that went direct to video - sorry, 1997’s Men Seeking Women, in which Ferrell was a supporting actor to Grant Shaud. This means that there’s a trove of Ferrell movies to dig through and rank. The body of work remains impressive, but his future is hardly certain. Although comedy remains his lane, he’s had less success with it in recent years. He has headlined studio comedies for decades. He’s an institution. But he’s at a bit of a crossroads, no longer the crazy young guy from Old School but also not someone who’s fully pivoted to dramatic roles in search of Oscars. His post- SNL movie career has been among the most momentous in the show’s history. He’s won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. We have updated it to include Ferrell’s recent work, including this week’s Strays, as well as two earlier voice-only roles that had previously been omitted. This post was originally published in 2015.
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