Funny and lazy. Blades of Glory will make you laugh but largely from one-liners and nonsequiturs (“True fact: I could not love a human baby as much as I love this brush”) rather than extended comic situations. Nevertheless, Will Ferrell and Jon Heder are excellent comic losers. The casting director gets an A for the inspired use of Amy Poehler, Will Arnett, and Jenna Fischer, and the costume designer earns an A+ for outfits that are often cleverer than the threadbare script.
Subplots come and disappear (the bad billionaire dad vanishes early, the black gay choreographer never gets his moment) but the real story arc is the growing affection between the former rivals played by Ferrell and Heder. Joe My God considers the movie homophobic because “Ferrell and Heder rolled their eyes and curled their lips in disgust at every touch,” but that’s only in acts one and two. By act three they are very comfortable touching, and Ferrell’s character, who has previously shown off his tattoos commemorating favorite trysts with famous women, proudly displays his new tattoo of Heder’s face inked next to his tatt of himself. The movie ends with them holding each other and rising through the roof of the Olympic dome, skating into the clouds. If anything, the story is one of overcoming homophobia.
Defamer suggests the reason that the $33 million opening weekend box office--Ferrell's second best ever-- was less than Talladega Night’s $47 million haul is because “tracking data from regions where Talladega did huge repeat business contained comments such as, 'When did Ricky Bobby turn into a Gay?' indicated a disinclination to see a big screen romp set in the world of man-on-man figure-skating competitions.” True, it’s not NASCAR, but the numbers could just as easily support the thesis that America loves gayish skaters more than soccer coaches (Kicking & Screaming $20M), newscasters (Anchorman $28M), or Santa’s helpers (Elf $31M). As for Talladega’s success, considering that the movie climaxes with a long kiss between Ricky Bobby and the gay French driver, the fact that it did “huge repeat business” indicates some comfort with man-on-man camaraderie.
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