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Will Ferrell's comedy has worn thin in soccer film
By CRAIG OUTHIER
GET OUT
Will Ferrell fans aren't a finicky lot. Give them some temper tantrums, crippling emotional issues and a silly dance or two, and they generally go home happy. Oh, and don't forget the piece de resistance: Ferrell's pale, flabby physique, suitable for streaking and other comic displays of buffness.

Ferrell's latest comedy, “Kicking & Screaming,” rigorously meets the criteria described above, but might I still suggest that it's a formulaic, puerile bore and an utter waste of time? Pairing Ferrell with a bunch of scrappy little kids on a soccer field — like “The Bad News Bears” with a hint of adult retardation — this thudding tale of fathers and sons starts slow, finishes tritely and sails decidedly wide of the goal.

Once again, Ferrell (“Old School”) has issues as Phil Weston, an athletically challenged nutritionist who has an attractive wife (Kate Walsh), a well-adjusted son (Dylan McLaughlin) and his own business. So what's eating Phil? Well, only the fact that his father, Buck Weston (Robert Duvall), happens to be an unbelievable butthead, so obsessed with winning that he kicks Phil's son, Sam, off the youth soccer team he coaches. What kind of man would give the heave-ho to his own grandson? “The most competitive man in the world,” Phil, still smarting from his dysfunctional upbringing, tells his wife.

When Sam's new team, the Tigers, suddenly has a coaching vacancy, Phil volunteers, setting the stage for a showdown with his dad, who cruelly scoffs at Phil's new endeavor. Naturally, the Tigers are a motley, talentless bunch, including a boy who eats worms (think Bluto from “Animal House,” only prepubescent) and a tiny, adorable Asian child (Elliot Cho) who has a pair of adoptive lesbian mothers.

The kids are cute; Ferrell is not. Or, more precisely, his blubbering manchild routine has worn charmlessly thin. This is not the Ferrell from “Old School,” whose suburban bedding-store blandness concealed an unbowed frat boy lust for beer and fun, but an inveterate wuss whose blandness and inadequacy inform every aspect of his behavior. When Phil has something resembling a nervous breakdown on his son's bed, it's not funny but simply very weird. If “Kicking & Screaming” were even the slightest bit realistic, his family would have committed him to a mental facility by the third reel.

In an odd but effective bit of stunt-casting, former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka, playing himself, happens to live next door to Buck and agrees to help Phil whip the Tigers into shape as a way of exacting revenge on his nettlesome neighbor. Ditka's red-faced bluster makes for an amusing counterpoint to Ferrell's squirreliness, and with the help of a pair of Italian ringers, the Tigers become a contender.

Then something halfway funny happens: Phil launches himself on a nonstop caffeine bender (coffee, according to Ditka, “fuels the dreams of champions”) and actually becomes Ditka, transforming himself into the kind of stomping sideline terror he swore he'd never become. Finally, Ferrell hits his stride.

Still, director Jesse Dylan (“American Wedding”) and screenwriters Leo Benvenuti and Steve Rudnick have pretty much lost us by then, and never exploit the potentially funniest relationship in “Kicking & Screaming”: Phil's sibling rivalry with Buck's athletic preteen son (Josh Hutcherson) from a second marriage.

Ferrell's comic foundation is one of absurdity, and what could more absurd than a 35-year-old man competing against a 10-year-old for the love of their father? Dylan's sense of shot placement is horrendously unsteady.

Even so, the biggest letdown in “Kicking & Screaming” might be that the great Robert Duvall elected to take a paycheck for it. As Buck, a silly man with silly insecurities, Duvall (“Tender Mercies”) gives one of the most irrelevant, even egregious, performances by a film legend since Laurence Olivier in “Clash of the Titans.” This is not what they call aging gracefully.