Walking into Blades of Glory, I was prepared to labor through another generic, unsuccessful and mass-produced SNL casted movie. This was far from the case. Blades of Glory is surprisingly good. If anything, it has proven that Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder was not a one-hit wonder.

The movie is the story of two champion male-figure skaters, bitter rivals for years, who must come together to make their dreams come true. Jimmy MacElroy (Heder) is a young skater who has been trained since the age of four by a nutty billionaire to be nothing but a programmed skating machine (his training involved growth hormone injections since he was five and hours spent in a wind tunnel to perfect his aerodynamic form). Chazz Michael Michaels (Will Ferrell) meanwhile, is a mature ladies' man who learned how to skate on skid row, in "the mean streets of Detroit's underground figure-skating gangs." Chazz has a drinking problem and is also a sex addict ("It's a real disease!") who has to go to Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings to try to control himself (and fails miserably at it). Jimmy has a squeaky-clean image; he is naïve and fairly modest, he does commercials for Make a Wish Foundation, and children across the nation are sporting the "MacElroy" haircut in emulation of him. Chazz…has a spread in Maxim magazine which proclaims that "Chazz is male figure skating!" (Chazz carries a copy around to flash at people who question the veracity of this claim), and hundreds of women throw their underwear onto the ice when he skates. When Chazz and Jimmy are forced to share a gold medal when they tie for first place, the situation quickly degenerates into a bare-knuckle brawl on live TV, and both are banned from males' singles skating for life. Jimmy shuffles through working at sporting goods stores while Chazz becomes a drunken wreck working at a children's ice skating show. However, one of Jimmy's stalker-fans points out that Jimmy could skate again in the upcoming competition, because he was only banned from singles skating—he could still register for pairs. Without enough time left to find a female skating partner, Jimmy is forced to team up with Chazz as an all-male pair…and the comedy begins.

I think what made Blades of Glory actually enjoyable is its economical editing: normally they let these kinds of movies drag out into tangents that simply aren't funny but this is not to be found here. Little time was spent actually developing these people as "characters," yet they never became "caricatures." It was Will Ferrell and Jon Heder acting like Will Ferrell and Jon Heder―but they're great guys so I don't mind. They cut out just enough material that I think it wouldn't have hurt to put back 20 minutes of material, but I'm not complaining. Even husband and wife team Will Arnett and Amy Poehler, playing the villainous siblings who make up the rival pairs figure-skating team, completely avoid the "look at me, I'm making a wacky cameo as an over-the-top villain" syndrome that many films have fallen to in the past, and they are actually enjoyable to watch. Even their little sister (and love interest for Jimmy) Jenna "that girl from The Office" Fischer avoided being a cardboard "girl next door stock character" and was pretty talented. The entire cast's performance can be summed up as unexpectedly likable, but maybe this is because I've seen too many shallow performances in the past. The movie is also filled with cameos by the likes of Rob Corddry and fellow "Frat Pack" member Luke Wilson, which rather than being shameless, are quite amusing.

Women will enjoy this on a level which I do not. A lot of the humor for them was apparently simply in seeing Heder and Ferrell having to touch each other in ways that would normally be considered inappropriate while they skate (i.e. to prevent Jimmy from landing on his head when he drops him during a lift, Chazz has to support him, one-handed, by touching his crotch). That isn't what the entire movie is like but women in the theater thought it was the best part, while all the guys in the theater were twitching uncomfortably during these scenes. Thankfully, this only happened a few times. I'd advocate taking your girlfriend to see it, as she'd think it was hysterically funny, but it's really not a "chic flick" per se.

Of course, I would recommend this movie purely based on the "Iron Lotus" joke alone: a skating move Jimmy and Chazz's grizzled coach invented which is so insane that he was only able to find one place "bat-shit crazy enough to attempt it: North Korea"….with lethal results. It's not a thing any sane man would do, but then again these are male figure-skaters, and theirs is a reckless breed.

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