'Semi-Pro' Fouls Out

We don't want to jump to hasty conclusions, but someone looking exactly like Will Ferrell appears to be starring in " Semi-Pro, " a head-shaker of a comedy in which the actor -- let's call him "Ferrell" -- plays Jackie Moon, a washed-up singer turned pro basketballer.

Our hesitation to identify him as the genuinely funny star of comedies such as "Old School" and "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" comes after seeing this actor's halfhearted, disconcertingly crude and only occasionally amusing performance.

As the player-coach and owner of the Flint, Mich., Tropics, a team in the American Basketball Association, he's meant to be a comical sign of his times. But his 'fro, sweatband and tight pants are cosmetic affectations more than comic applications. Those 1970s-era touches were funnier in "Anchorman." And the movie's R-rated material doesn't really suit the Ferrell we have come to appreciate. That Ferrell -- the earlier, funnier one -- brings a sort of bird-just-born innocence to his roles. He is a perpetual child whose squawk of a voice portrays an irrepressibly funny personality forever trying to come to grips with a complex world.

Andr¿ Benjamin, Woody Harrelson, Maura Tierney and David Koechner -- all talented -- seem amazingly zombie-like here. And Jackie Earle Haley, as a stoner fan of the Tropics, is more disconcerting than funny: He appears to be trying to undergird his comic performance with gritty realism, completely out of whack with the movie's goofy intentions.

-- Desson Thomson

Semi-Pro R, 90 minutes Contains crude humor and profanity. Area theaters. Semi-Pro R, 90 minutes Contains crude humor and profanity. Area theaters.