'Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga'

Has Will Ferrell lost his comedic fastball? Or is he just in an extended creative rut - distracted by other projects and / or resting on his considerable laurels?

For those of us who grew up with Ferrell as the singular force that made Saturday Night Live funny in the late 1990s and entered adulthood as he starred in a string of comedy classics - Elf, Old School, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Step Brothers - this has been the uncomfortable quietly uttered question of the past decade or so. Unfortunately, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is not going to make those utterances any softer or more infrequent.

The Netflix comedy has a quite familiar Ferrell-ian conceit. Two mediocre-to-poor singers from Iceland luck their way in to the Eurovision Song Contest and find themselves thrust in to a stratosphere where they don’t really belong. Hilarity is supposed to ensue, whether it’s a gag about the silly Icelandic belief in elves, the absurd costumes the singers wear, or the blend of indignant screaming, obliviousness, and slapstick that are by now Ferrell trademarks. You throw Ferrell in to a silly outfit and a world that is real, ridiculous in its own right and even more ridiculous with him there, and laughs are supposed to follow.

Trouble is, they just don’t here. Eurovision Song Contest isn’t funny. I chuckled a few times. I didn’t get a full-body laugh once. The movie ended. I puzzled.

The thing is, Eurovision Song Contest isn’t poorly executed. David Dobkin, of Wedding Crashers fame, is a competent director, and it shows, from the quite beautiful local scenery in Iceland to the believable pageantry of the song contest. The Icelandic accents of Ferrell and co-star Rachel McAdams are actually quite good. There is even a considerable soft heart to the film, which is not something you’ve always been able to say about Ferrell’s romps.

I was invested in the stalled romance between Ferrell’s character Lars Erickssong and McAdams’ Sigrit Ericksdottir working out, and in Lars winning the begrudging approval of his distant father Erick, played by Pierce Brosnan. I even really enjoyed the “songalong,” a trippy, music video-style interlude that got the cast singing familiar tunes and gave the film a much-needed infusion of energy.

I just … didn’t laugh.

And so all I am really left wondering is whether this was all an eventual outcome of being exposed to Ferrell’s comedy for decades or whether I should hold out hope he can rediscover his form and make something new that will make me laugh like something old.

I don’t have an answer or even an inclination here. Ferrell, looking much older, is certainly trying to tell the same joke he was in the 2000s in films like Talladega Nights and Blades of Glory especially. Did I change? Did he? Or did I just hear the same joke one too many times?

Ferrell’s star - his long shadow on comedy for the past few decades - means I am liable to hold out hope that the next Eurovision Song Contest will bring that return to form. More than ever, it seems a quixotic hope.