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By Cole Smithey

‘Semi-Pro’

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Will Ferrell loiters in the comfort of his signature punch-drunk delivery of outrageous lines and sight gags in a ’70s era parody that extends the funk vibe of Judd Apatow’s summer comedy “Superbad.” In Flint, Mich., Jackie Moon (Ferrell) is an R&B singer, basketball team owner, team player and promoter for the Flint Tropics, a team playing under the rules of the American Basketball Association.

The movie opens to the strains of Ferrell crooning “We’re naked and we’re humping sexy” from a Jackie Moon song called “Love Me Sexy,” written with lyrics stolen from Moon’s deceased mother. The song’s humorous effect expands as Moon sings it to a sparse coliseum crowd with an infectious glee. Intent on winning the Tropics a place among teams merging into the NBA, the afro-haired Moon hires Monix (Woody Harrelson), a former benchwarmer for the champion Boston Celtics, to lead the Tropics to victory in their last season. In spite of its fractured sketch comedy design, “Semi-Pro” provides a requisite number of Saturday Night Live-type laughs to keep audiences satisfied.

Screenwriter Scot Armstrong (“Old School”) keeps the comedy visual and the language profane in a movie you won’t be seeing on your next commercial airline flight. Ferrell has, by osmosis with screenwriters, branded his dry underplayed slapstick spaz attacks. The aging frat boy character that he created in Armstrong’s “Old School” has gone from a bedeviled racecar driver (“Talladega Nights”) to a sexually challenged championship ice skater (“Blades of Glory”), to a do-it-all basketball player in an economically challenged city of Flint, circa 1976.

There’s a blue-collar theme that runs under the ’70s era setting, and carries a sense of America’s current recession and weak dollar. Monix takes the job with Moon’s team in exchange for a washing machine and to be near his ex-girlfriend Lynn (Maura Tierney). The romantic subplot serves as a perfunctory placeholder that never jibes with the zany comedy situations. Harrelson is distinctly unfunny opposite Ferrell because he never catches up to the comic timing around him, and Tierney looks great but never gets to establish her character’s straight-man charm. Harrelson’s casting is a flaw that begs questions about which other cast members might have handled the role better.

Ferrell has become the Bill Murray of his day. He’s a staple Indiewood actor for a type of self-effacing comedy that’s dependable for its lack of cynicism. You know that his movies will feel slender, but you’ll get your money’s worth of laughs. “Semi-Pro” isn’t an earnest comedy like “Knocked Up,” but it mocks the modern age of political correctness with a passion that comes through especially in irreverent supporting performances from Andre Benjamin, Jackie Earle Haley, Will Arnett and Andrew Daly, who plays a suggestible television sportscaster. Nostalgia for the bad old days of the ’70s in America can only mean one thing; the 21st century still hasn’t found its footing. CV

‘Vantage Point’

Movie Trailer

Director Pete Travis (“Omagh”) has turned debut screenwriter Barry Levy’s Rashomon-inspired script about an assassination attempt against a U.S. president on a visit to Salamanca into a dizzyingly complex puzzle that sits comfortably next to such great political thrillers as “In the Line of Fire.”

The ever-impressive Dennis Quaid raises his leading man status as Thomas Barnes, a Secret Service bodyguard returning to duty for the first time since taking a bullet for President Ashton (William Hurt) a year earlier. There’s more than a little relevance in the story’s Spanish setting where the president has arrived for a summit on the global war on terror. At noon, rifle shots penetrate the president’s chest as he takes the podium in a public square where an American news team captures the shocking scene. Seconds later, a bomb blast reduces the area to bodies and rubble. The clock returns to noon at 10-minute intervals that allow us to see, in chunks, the circumstances from the various viewpoints of a suspect, an American tourist, a terrorist and the president, before splitting off into an energized climax that links the pieces together with fast twitch precision.

We’re introduced to the characters’ varying intensities in the context of the two sudden eruptions of violence. The president goes down, Barnes sees a man run on stage and stops him with a football tackle that flattens the suspect. Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker), a lone American tourist, searches the scene with a video camera that captures a more subjective version than the one being blasted across the airwaves by TV news producer Rex Brooks (Sigourney Weaver) from the relative comfort of her trailer. Barnes and his partner Kent (Matthew Fox) go back a long way together, and the way they interact throughout becomes a homing beacon for the film’s chiaroscuro study of internal motivation versus external attempts at fulfilling allegiances of duty.

Everything about “Vantage Point” is unexpected. The way the film indirectly yet directly addresses terrorism, betrayal and politics is unconventional. Plenty is left to the imagination. When the camera shifts from ground level close-up views to distant aerial positions, we’re drawn to the place and characters in a personal contemplative way. And there are chase sequences, not just any chase scenes, but chases that invade your heart and your throat. Before becoming a filmmaker, the Manchester-born Travis worked his way through film school as a motorcycle courier, and you can see his low and fast perspective in these scenes.

What Travis has done is nothing short of creating a new kind of American action film that feels European in the same way that William Friedkin’s “French Connection” did. Travis makes the all-inclusive association between cultures without stressing the issue. All agendas are personal, and every character commits with utter devotion. The movie sweats out its story, and we gravitate to Quaid’s character to cuss and fight on our behalf. “Vantage Point” is the first great action thriller of the year, and the first great political thriller in a long while. CV

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