It’s the new Will Ferrell movie.

Need we say more?

Over the past decade, Will Ferrell – perhaps more than any other mainstream comedic talent – has perfected his brand of schtick into a reliable science.

His ingredients are almost always the same: A classic institution, an exaggerated hero who takes something about that institution to the extreme, a sidekick or two that can match his intensity, and a willingness to push his characters beyond the point of humiliation.

The very fact that his naked physique is so well know is itself a testament to Ferrell’s methods. He knows his white, pasty flab gets laughs, and if that’s what it’ll take to get an audience to chuckle, he’s more than happy to oblige.

For anyone familiar with his most recent hits, the reliable giggles in “Blades of Glory” are easy to predict. Last year’s “Talladega Nights” poked fun at the institution of NASCAR; two years ago it was broadcast news in “Anchorman;” three years ago it was the college frat scene, with Ferrell jumping between the extremes of a happily married suburban thirtysomething and the booze-chugging frat boy wannabe.

And so it’s easy to guess, even without seeing “Blades of Glory,” just how Ferrell will poke fun at this more graceful, elegant, and athletic of sports.

Namely by portraying the most macho, intense, out-of-shape, in-your-face skater imaginable. As the perfectly-named Chazz Michael Michaels, Ferrell’s rough and tough – the man with the mullet who enjoys giving his fans a few pelvic thrusts and prefers to chug the hard liquor both before and after taking to the ice.

As we enter this exaggerated, hyper-competitive skating universe, we learn Chazz’s biggest rival is Jimmy MacElroy (Jon Heder, of “Napolean Dynamite”), the soft-spoken, tutu-wearing, effeminate kid wonder. He glides while Chazz pounces, and skates from the heart while Chazz skates from the gut.

They hate each other, but when they are both kicked out of the individual skating world for taking part in a public brawl, they set their differences aside to return to the sport the only way the rules will allow: As a pair, with a spectacular skating move never before seen in hopes of defeating the dynamite brother-sister Van Waldenberg (Will Arnett and Amy Poehler) duo.

While the laughs tend to be shorter this time around, they are just as plentiful – and that’s part of Ferrell’s lasting success. He is able to take any formula, any blueprint of a comedy, and find the humor at every angle, lurking in every corner. In “Blades,” four stories play out next to each other. There’s the tough guy learning to work with the timid guy, the awkwardness of the all-male skating routine, the fanatical family out to beat them, and the death-defying secret move that they hope will wow the world.

There’s even a light-hearted bit of romance that threatens to tear the two men apart, and a high-speed skating chase that starts on a frozen lake and then ends inside, as a hilarious, stumbling, slow-motion pursuit between two men trying not to fall over.

While Ferrell has proven, with the surprisingly sweet-natured “Elf” and the downright philosophical “Stranger than Fiction,” that he can do something more challenging than this, it’s also apparent that he’s having a lot of fun playing with these notions of competition and masculinity.

So much fun, in fact, that he already has two more projects on the near horizon– one that finds Ferrell as the coach of a semi-pro basketball team, and another that gives him a competitive step-brother. So check off the institutions of b-ball and family, as the Ferrell marathon keeps right on chugging along. A political farce can’t be far away.

by: Steven Snyder steven@zertinet.com, Published 2007-03-26