Not too bad.

Rating: 7/10 (26 October 2007)

I expected little from Blades of Glory, as I usually do when I see a comedy on DVD that I've never heard of. On the other hand, I live in central eastern China now and everything here is pirated, so it's no surprise that I know little about what is going on in American theaters. At first glance it seemed like an expected pairing of a hugely famous comedian, Will Farrell, with a new and inexplicably famous comedian (I'm sorry, Napoleon Dynamite just didn't do anything for me), riding on the wave of attention generated by his debut film.
The movie is better than I expected, but is still nothing more than your standard Saturday Night Live comedy, and even those are generally much better than this. Farrell and Heder play Chazz Michael Michaels and Jimmy MacElroy, two bitter figure skating rivals who can't stop acting like children, even when standing on the podium. The result is that they get into a fistfight after obtaining an unlikely tie in an important competition. They set the mascot on fire and everything. As is to be expected, they are booted out of professional competition forever.
MacElroy gets a lowly job fitting skates on bratty kids at a skating rink, never letting go of his tireless skating perfectionism, even when it gets him kicked off of the cushy skate-fitting job and back to the store-room or something. Michaels, on the other hand, continues to skate, although in the capacity of some goofy character in an ice-skating performance for children. His incredible amount of boozing and womanizing does two things, it makes me wish he didn't have my name twice in his name, and it ultimately gets him fired for puking in his costume during a performance.
After a few years, some nutjob stalker of MacElroy's (played by that guy who seems to like nutjob stalker roles) discovers a loophole in the rules. Michaels and MacElroy are banned from competition, but only SINGLES competition. They can still compete as a pair, which leads to all sorts of low-brow hilarity. Both main characters are goofy caricatures, even goofier than you might expect, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. But in general it's entertaining enough, the production values are impressive. I've seen better but this is not a bad way to spend an hour and a half...