Critic Reviews
47
Metascore
Mixed or Average
positive
8(28%)
mixed
15(52%)
negative
6(21%)
Showing 29 Critic Reviews
75
Semi-Pro is so shabbily staged, shot and edited that it hardly ranks as a movie, much less a sports film, but hilarious people keep turning up in it.
75
None of Ferrell's movies have ever really done justice to the best of his "Saturday Night Live" work, but those of us who love his comedy have learned to take the good with the bad.
75
Ultimately, we don't purchase tickets to Will Ferrell movies for their sweeping romantic storylines, but because he makes us laugh. And Semi-Pro offers plenty of reasons to do so.
70
Very much in the tradition of "Slap Shot," George Roy Hill's raucously funny and foul-mouthed 1977 laffer about the misadventures of a minor-league hockey team, Semi-Pro scores big laughs with the rowdy play-by-play of hard-luck hoopsters struggling for professional survival.
70
Semi-Pro finds the sweet spot between sports melodrama and parody, and hammers it for 90 diverting minutes.
63
Definitely more than semi-funny.
63
Critics will score Semi-Pro on its missed shots. My guess is that audiences will do what they always do with Ferrell: remember when he killed them laughing.
63
The problem with Semi-Pro is that it keeps forgetting it's a parody of sports movies; the final scenes are supposed to be uplifting (sort of) but they're not fooling anyone. The film's much better when it just lets the guys gas and sass each other.
60
What at least distinguishes Semi-Pro from its predecessors (not only those starring Ferrell, but also such lesser lights as "Dodgeball" and "Balls of Fury") is that it's a slightly darker movie--one made for grown-ups, hence the R rating.
60
The comedy is sloppy, crude and contains far too many misfires, but the film does capture the old ABA spirit in its ungainly struggles to wrestle laughs from seriously mediocre material.
