Double Lutzes: 'Blades of Glory'

I can guarantee that "Blades of Glory" is two times funnier than the average American comedy. That's because it has two jokes, instead of one.

The first is: When straight men flounce, it's funny. It just is. Sorry, don't shoot the messenger, but at least to some, it's always funny.

The movie's high jinks come when Will Ferrell and Jon Heder sashay into the graceful world of figure skating and camp it up like a convention of Liberace impersonators, though the script is at pains to keep them nominally hetero. Figure skating, like ballet, while demanding the highest in athleticism, strength, stamina and courage, at the same time requires men to place their bodies into positions that they might not naturally assume. Its style, for men, is gay. Things that don't usually stick out must be stuck out; things that don't usually dangle must be dangled; things that don't normally arch must be arched. For this reason, and the uneasiness that many heterosexuals still feel, even in these enlightened times, about behavior slightly tinted with lavender, the two activities are the focus of much he-boy mirth.

Shamelessly, Ferrell and Heder give themselves over to this practice. They play figure skating competitors, and the endless hilarity is visual: those awkward, self-conscious hetero male bodies, ill-formed and quaking with reluctance, thrown into a gossamer flutter of swanlike routines, clumsily syncopating themselves to the fantasy that they are light and graceful when, as all can see and laugh at, they are hopeless, clueless and graceless. To see seemingly reg'lar guys utterly stripped of dignity and defense is cruel enough, but crueler still is the laughter that you cannot seem to stop from rupturing your lungs and aorta. The costumes, meanwhile, look like they were designed by Salvador Dali high on absinthe and cocaine, with an unlimited sparkle budget. But that's any figure skating costume, isn't it?

As the plot has it, the two -- who for reasons soon to be disclosed (joke No. 2) are banned from the rink -- find a loophole that permits them back onto the ice to skate as a team, since the male-female linkage is only a tradition and not a rule. Thus, though they hate each other, they team up, boy-boy, and all that intimate face-in-crotch and hand-on-butt stuff that's so stimulating to us when it's across the boy-girl chasm suddenly becomes hysterical when it's boy-boy and each guy is so desperate that he has to go forward with it. Other people's misfortune is so amusing!

As the movie has it, the lumbering, hairy Ferrell plays the overcompensating Chazz Michael Michaels, an "outlaw" skater who has invented a persona as the Mick Jagger of the figure skating world. The joke is that his machismo is mostly fantasy and his hyper-masculinity is all the more off-putting for being fraudulent. Heder, still looking for a hit to cement his career after "Napoleon Dynamite," plays Jimmy MacElroy, slighter, wispier, more graceful, more girly. Again it's funny seeing the lanky Heder trying desperately to achieve the fairy-princess, sparkly grace necessary for the demanding sport. The fact that he gets a little closer than Ferrell actually makes him funnier; when he goes into his tra-la-la on the ice -- they're both shameless, I should add -- sticking his tushie out and making like a princess cygnet with his flappity-flapping arms as his chiffon costume trails tendrils in the wind and his cupid-blond hair gently vibrates, he's a thing of non-beauty and a joy forever.

Joke No. 2: the endless humor of immature hostility. Jimmy and Chazz hate each other so much that they can't control themselves, but they're so stupid and inarticulate that their zingers don't zing. Frustrated, they just can't keep from acting out, and while sharing the podium after a tie for gold, they begin rolling around on the ice, throwing ill-timed punches, scratching each other's eyes, kneeing each other's crotches. They look like cats fighting in a bag and it's not pretty (hence their ban from singles competition). Much of the movie's humor comes from their complete inability to control their emotions, which spurt out all the time in messy, childish disarray. Men behaving badly: a surefire laugh-getter.

The filmmakers -- the directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck and it seems about six different teams worked on the script -- bring in a semblance of plot at the halfway point. Chazz and Jimmy are opposed in their aspirations to return to the top by the brother-sister team of Stranz and Fairchild Van Waldenberg (Will Arnett and Amy Poehler of "SNL"), who turn out to be ruthless, nasty and mean, always fine comic attributes. Far from being ruthless, nasty and mean, our heroes deserve to win because they are stupid, narcissistic and selfish.

William Fichtner has a nice spin as Jimmy's ruthless, nasty and mean adoptive father, who abandons him when he is kicked out of skating, and Craig T. Nelson, who plays either coaches or cops, here plays a coach to decent effect. Seventy-nine-year-old William Daniels, one of the best character actors in the history of movies, has a nice little role. Jenna Fischer, whom some will spot as Pam from TV's "The Office," plays the Van Waldenbergs' wallflower sister with a thing for Jimmy. More than a few members of the figure skating community -- Dorothy Hamill, Peggy Fleming, Scott Hamilton, Brian Boitano and Nancy Kerrigan -- show up to prove they're good sports, and the beautiful Sasha Cohen has a funny cameo at the end that's worth waiting for.

Blades of Glory (93 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, profanity and some drug references. Also, the mascot Snowflake gets an arrow in the head.