The movie Will Ferrell made because his wife told him to: “That’s ironic, and hilarious”
Some actors are successful enough in their genres to absolutely dominate a certain era, and without doubt, that’s what happened to Will Ferrell in the years between around 2003 and 2010, when he not only starred in a string of massive comedy hits but also spawned countless films made in the same vein.
Without counting the throwback sex comedy Old School, he had an outrageous run that kicked off with a future Christmas classic in Jon Favreau’s Elf, and then encompassed genuine laugh-out-loud movies like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Talladega Nights (“Chip, I’m gonna come at you like a spider monkey!”), Wedding Crashers and the utter genius that is Step Brothers, a film which gets incrementally funnier with each year that passes.
And that’s before we consider The Other Guys from 2010, which I saw the other day and is much more amusing than I remember the first time out, with a gloriously unhinged cameo from Stranger Things’ Brett Gelman and the total bafflement of Wahlberg that Eva Mendes could possibly be Will Ferrell’s wife.
Ferrell was a busy man indeed during this golden period, and he showed he could do the straight stuff too, making movies like the little-remembered but actually very good Stranger Than Fiction from 2006 and Land of the Lost.
They weren’t all hits, of course; there were some ill-advised forays into sports comedy, Semi-Pro was too bizarre and basketball too boring to work properly, and Kicking and Screaming seemed to just be a film made simply because Ferrell happened to be a football fan, as well as being a movie that should never have borne Robert Duvall’s name.
But in the main you were pretty much guaranteed a great Ferrell comedy at least once if not twice a year during that period, one of which united Napoleon Dynamite and the best, screamiest elements of Ferrell in a very amusing comedy-on-ice.
Ferrell told The AV Club about why he decided to make another sports drama, saying: “As I was in Charlotte filming [Talladega], my wife and I were watching figure skating, and she literally said, ‘Someone should make a comedy about figure skating.’ The next day, I get this call about this script, Blades Of Glory, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s ironic, and hilarious.'”
Released in 2007, Ferrell teamed up with Jon Heder for the movie, the pair of them donning sequinned suits and trying to win a world figure-skating championship in a movie that proved to be a big hit, grossing some $145million at the box office. While it’s not on the level of the likes of Anchorman or Talladega Nights, there are some superbly funny moments, and it represents peak-Ferrell, with all the histrionics you’d expect.
Ferrell has gone on to act in as many as 150 movies over his career, and he has some good stuff coming up to look forward to, not least a movie called Tough Guys with Ryan Gosling and a Gus Van Sant film called The Prince of Fashion. The pick of the bunch may well be a movie called Street Justice, however, which promises to star Ferrell as a vigilante dispensing his own brand of vengeance on the criminal community, which, even as a premise, is made funny as soon as you picture Ferrell doing it.
He’ll also be starring in a film called Judgment Day alongside Zac Efron, the tale of a prisoner who takes over a televised courtroom in the hope that taking hostages will help him win his case.
