The career battle Will Ferrell knows he’ll never win: “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t”
There comes a moment in many careers where it’s unfortunately clear the best times are behind you. Footballers lose a yard of pace, singers get a bit of a voice wobble, and racehorses decide they’d rather nibble some grass than run faster than some other horses for money.
Sadly, for Will Ferrell, that time has seemingly come. If you don’t agree, then I would entreat you to watch the trailer for his latest comedy, a golfing movie on Netflix called The Hawk, which looks… well, it doesn’t look great, let’s be honest. In fact, that’s being ridiculously generous.
Aside from the fact that Adam Sandler has already done slapstick golf comedy about as well as it can be, thirty years ago with Happy Gilmore, the rest of the ‘gags’ appear to basically be Ferrell shouting loudly in various situations, an erection joke that is exactly the same one as he did in 2004’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and someone getting hit on the head with a golf ball, which is about as lowest common denominator in terms of comedy as you’re going to find.
It might be the most dated trailer of recent years, and from just one minute of footage, it looks like the film itself could go down as one of the worst movies in memory, a category that Ferrell has previous with, thanks to the risible nonsense Holmes & Watson in 2018. The problem is that it’s the equivalent of a band just making the same album over and over again, and it feels like Ferrell’s brand of comedy simply doesn’t sit with the 2020s.
In the 2000s, it was great. Undeniably. Anchorman was fantastic, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby was superb, and Step Brothers gets better with every year that passes. Elf is a Christmas classic and always will be. But honestly, Ferrell is 57 now and watching him do stuff like dry hump a golf bunker and play a cowbell on SNL seems slightly tired 20 years on.
Perhaps he needs to do more of the things that have shown he has far more to his game than boner jokes, like the multi-award-winning documentary he produced for Netflix back in 2024 called Will & Harper, that saw him cross America with one of his closest friends after they transitioned to a woman.
Or maybe he could pivot to more straight drama, something he’s been asked about a lot over his career. Back in 2013 for instance, as he released Anchorman 2 and was grilled by Timeout on doing more serious parts, he said: “Now that I haven’t done one in a while a lot of journalists say, ‘I’ve really liked your dramatic work, are you going to do more?’ When you do one, though, the same people say, ‘How do you feel about those who say you’re just looking to be taken seriously?’ You were just asking me why I don’t do more! So it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I’m constantly keeping my eyes open, but you never know if it’s the right thing.”
It seems like there might be a happy medium for Ferrell, and for an example, you could look to his 2006 comedy drama Stranger Than Fiction, the tale of a man who realises his entire life is being written as he lives it by a novelist as he scrambles to prevent his own death. Ferrell was brilliant in the role, nominated for a ‘Best Actor’ Golden Globe, and the movie showed a more subdued side to him, as he went opposite talent like Dustin Hoffman and Maggie Gyllenhaal.
