To show that he's serious, Moon immediately trades the team's washing machine to the Kentucky Colonels for a player who can actually play: Eddie Monix (Woody Harrelson), who wears an NBA championship ring around his neck, though he won it just warming the bench for the Boston Celtics.
The movie's plot resembles Slap Shot mixed with every great sports movie Ron Shelton ever made, including Bull Durham and White Men Can't Jump (which starred Harrelson). But you can gauge how much of a burlesque Semi-Pro is by the way Harrelson - yes, quirky, unpredictable Harrelson - functions as a straight man for the rest of the movie.
While Harrelson's Monix imbues the team with discipline and wins his ex-girlfriend (Maura Tierney) back from her goofball fanboy boyfriend (Rob Corddry), the movie becomes a series of riffs on Moon's everyday practice of semi-mind over matter.
It's far from a one-man show. Writer Scot Armstrong earns his keep by filling the slapdash script with fixated personalities. Director Kent Alterman earns his by casting them with comedians or comic actors who can create a humorous ambience with a fleeting expression. He detonates big laughs with Andy Richter's quizzical smile as Moon's right-hand man, Bobby Dee, and Andre Benjamin's shriveling glare as a budding African-American superstar who runs through a series of nicknames and ends up as "Coffee Black."
Semi-Pro is so shabbily staged, shot and edited that it hardly ranks as a movie, much less a sports film, but hilarious people keep turning up in it, including Jackie Earle Haley as a stoner, Saturday Night Live's Kristen Wiig as a bear-handler whose main experience has been with cats, and Will Arnett and Andrew Daly as a macho-and-milquetoast team of local TV sportscasters.
The pacing and the staging are lackadaisical at best, but the virtue of this film's looseness it that is has some of the airy unpredictability of the best late-night TV comedy. One scene of a bunch of guys, including Arnett, Daly, Ferrell and Tim Meadows, playing with an empty gun, is as inventive as a scene from another look at the '70s, Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, except that it doesn't go on forever - and it's funny.
That's true of the whole movie. Basketball is a tall man's game, but Semi-Pro is short and sweet. In his own way, Ferrell is doing today what Martin did 30 years ago: creating a kind of put-on comedy that invites everybody in.
michael.sragow@baltsun.com
