Ferrell’s ‘Semi-Pro’ a complete airball

On DVD

“SEMI-PRO,” directed by Kent Alterman, written by Scot Armstrong, 87 minutes, rated R.

Kent Alterman “Semi-Pro” is awful. Full-on awful. There’s nothing semiawful about it. The movie is pointless, it isn’t funny, it’s lazy and it’s stupid, and it had the packed crowd at my screening last February lulled into the sort of restless coma in which all you could hear was breathing. And sighing. And if the guy in front of me was any indication, also deep moments of slumber.

The movie is billed as a comedy, and yet nobody was laughing at the string of pseudohip, semiwritten jokes littered throughout.

Based on Scot Armstrong’s remedial script, “Semi-Pro” finds Will Ferrell trotting out that same ol’ bumbling shtick he has been prostituting to the masses for years, sometimes with success. That isn’t the case here.

Here, he’s moody Jackie Moon, a flabby, aging semipro basketball player from Flint, Mich., who sports the sort of tawny Afro Barbra Streisand donned during her Esther Hoffman days in 1976’s “A Star is Born.” For Ferrell, this isn’t exactly a plus – the wig isn’t funny – but neither is his performance, which is sacked by a script that doesn’t allow him the sort of lines he could sell.

In a nutshell, the plot: Moon is the player, coach and owner of a middling semipro basketball team called the Flint Tropics, which is about to have a chance to enter the NBA. To do so, Moon and his players need to attract a major fan base, which is achieved in all sorts of ways that have little to do with basketball, such as Moon roller-skating down a jump and flying over a bevy of nearly naked women or, in one scene, fighting a bear, because, you know, what’s funnier than fighting a bear?

The movie struggles to find an answer while, in the interim, a distracting subplot tries to take hold. It involves Woody Harrelson as a former pro basketball player named Monix, who is fighting to get back with his ex-girlfriend, Lynn (Maura Tierney). Why do we care about these two when their characters and their relationship are so unformed? The answer is that we don’t. Like so much of this bum movie, the characters are stranded and the subplot goes nowhere, but that, at this point, shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Grade: BOMB