Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby - 2006 - Film

Friday, August 11, 2006

Will Ferrell has perfected the art of running aimlessly while flailing his arms, clothed in saggy underpants and a racing helmet. This is what Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is about, and it is genius.

Ferrell and friends, namely Steve Carell, Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, and even "serious" actors like Paul Rudd and John C. Reilly, are the least controversial of Hollywood personalities, and time and again we get the sense that this group of chums entertains one another by their own silliness. In movies like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004), and Zoolander (2001), they inflate a caricature with so much exaggeration that the film becomes a platform for these guys to out-maneuver each other with their comic skills. Whoever yells louder, or more likely, whoever has the better gay lispy lingo (Ferrell in Zoolander), better macho mannerism (Stiller in Dodgeball), or raunchiest redneck dialect (toss up between Ferrell and John C. Reilly in Talladega Nights) wins. And yet, their humor manages never to be condescending or mean-spirited. They tell jokes based on stereotypes, and the more exaggerated those stereotypes get the more asinine they look. So their movies are more about these guys making fun of themselves (or each other), no one gets hurt, and it's f@*!'ing funny.


Robert Wilonsky at The Village Voice, on the other hand, had this to say about Talladega Nights:

But the tale of Ricky Bobby (Ferrell, of course), an abandoned kid who grows up to be a famous NASCAR driver, is beside the point. It's just the watered-down glue that keeps the movie from playing like a series of sketches in which grown-ass men do dumbass-kid stuff for nearly two hours. There are two kinds of scenes here: the short ones that advance the storyline, and the prolonged sequences in which Ferrell and/or John C. Reilly (as Ricky's best friend, the whitest-trash Cal Naughton Jr.) and/or Sacha Baron Cohen (as Ricky's rival, French fancy boy Jean Girard) make shit up and crack each other up and stop the cameras and start all over again. There's no difference between the movie and the end-credit outtakes.

And though he may not like it, the unrestrained goofiness and de-emphasis on a lame moral-tagged tale is the movie's punch line. I am also not sure what the term "grown-ass" means.

You can read A.O. Scott's thoughtful review here, who also thinks Talladega Nights's imprecise narrative weakens the experience. Nevertheless, he clearly appreciates and enjoys the comic antics.

And a quick final note: Anyone who thinks the yelling match in the hospital scene between Ricky Bobby (Ferrell) and Lucius Washington (Michael Clarke Duncan) is not funny has no sense of humor. Period.