Blades of Glory Earns a Silver Medal for Laughs

On the figure skating judge's scale of zero to six, Will Ferrel and Jon Heder's new comedy, Blades of Glory, scores about a 4.5 for degree of difficulty, execution of some wild costume designs, and perfect landings of some pretty funny one-liners. Ferrel's term "mind bottling" (as opposed to "mind boggling") may even become as widely used as Seinfeld's "double-dipping." Written and directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck (screenwriters and directors of Culture and Angry Boy), this hyperbole-laden perspective of figure skating is worth a seat in the theater sidelines.

The story opens to a snowy orphanage, where young skating prodigy Jimmy MacElroy (Heder) is impressing millionaire science mogul Darren MacElroy (William Fichtner) with his double-axles and dizzying spins. His performance, all to the dramatic melody of Andrea Bocelli's "Con Te Partiro," wows Darren. He adopts Jimmy and takes him to his mansion laboratory, where he attempts to make him the perfect athlete (and a complete hypochondriac who can't go anywhere without hand sanitizer).

The scene fast forwards to the World Wintersport Games -- a cinematic representation of the Olympics -- where Jimmy, dressed as a peacock, competes against his arch-nemesis, the leather wearing, self-proclaimed sex-addict Chazz Michael Michaels (Ferrel). The animosity is immediately evident: Jimmy tells Chazz to get out of his face, and Chazz retorts, "I'll get inside your face." The two, whose style is at completely opposite ends of the skating spectrum, tie for the gold medal and end up in a punching match on the First Place Podium. They are consequently stripped of their medals and banished from single figure skating competitions for the rest of their lives by a panel of Olympic icons, including Nancy Kerrigan, Dorothy Hamill and Brian Boitano. Darren immediately disowns Jimmy, leaving him on the side of the road with his matching turquoise luggage, and Chazz resorts to a life skating for a children's show on ice.