"The Cutting Edge" as farcical dark comedy

Rating: 9/10 (5 April 2008)

If you haven't seen The Cutting Edge (a great film and probably the best figure-skating film of all time), or are not a professional figure skater (or someone close to one), you'll miss a lot of subtle humor in this film. As it says in the trivia section, the "Iron Lotus" trick in the film was based on the Pamchencko from The Cutting Edge, and is in fact the same trick. This parody doesn't stop there, however, as I felt like I was watching an alternate-universe version of The Cutting Edge, written by someone with a penchant for sick-comedy.
What makes this parody work is that it parodies both the sport and its inspiration film equally. The bluerint for the two films is almost identical: prima-donna skater (John Heder as Jimmy/"Kate") suffers bad break at the same olympics as nuts-and-bolts skater (Will Farrell as Chazz Michael Michaels/"Doug"). Jimmy's failure causes his overbearing "father" to disown him, but then, a partner is finally found for the pairs, while Jimmy's crazy coach (Craig T. Nelson as Coach/"Pamchenko") nurses along the love-hate relationship between the two protagonists against an evil pair of sport royalty (the von Waldenbergs/"Peckarovskis").
As in The Cutting Edge, the skaters are tempted to sleep with the enemy, in this case "Katie" von Waldenberg, the sister of the rival team. An evil plot is hatched (this time from the opponents rather than the judges) to keep the leads off the medal podium, and part of stopping the plot is Coach's infamous "iron lotus" move, which in this movie had been tried once before, with much more predictable and hilarious results. A subtle beauty of this film is that you realize just how much this is based on The Cutting Edge only after you see the iron lotus.
Whoever wrote this film either really loves or really hates figure skating, probably a bit of both, but also left no stone unturned int parodying a sport that needs to be parodied, and a film that was way better than the critics ever realized. I would love to have been in the room when D.b. Sweeney and Moira Kelly were watching this film. My guess is they wouldn't have stopped laughing once.
What is perhaps most amazing to me is that while I activeily dislike almost every actor in this film, each of them stayed true to the material, allowed it to be the star, nad was bearable in their "supporting" role. So was the film.